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• Author : Laird Barron
• Narrator : Jon Padgett
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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“Mysterium Tremendum” was originally published in Occultation and Other Stories in 2010.

Part 3 of 3

Listen to Part 1 here: http://pseudopod.org/2018/05/11/pseudopod-594-mysterium-tremendum-part-1/

Listen to Part 2 here: http://pseudopod.org/2018/05/18/pseudopod-595-mysterium-tremendum-part-2/

More information on Blood Standard here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35464016-blood-standard

Mysterium Tremendum by Laird Barron

11.

During breakfast I relayed my encounter with the mystery animals, floating the idea that perhaps we should skip the hike. “Wow, a couple of bears outside? Why didn’t you get us up? I would’ve loved to see that.” Victor seemed truly disappointed while Dane and Glenn dismissed my concerns that we might run afoul of them during the day. Dane said, “We’ll just let Vicky run his yapper while we walk. Bears will hear that a mile away and beat it for the hills.”

“Gonna be hotter than the hobs of Hades,” Glenn said after shrugging on his backpack. “What the hell are hobs?” Dane said. “Hubs, farm boy,” Glenn said. “Don’t neglect your canteens, fellow campers. Put on some sunscreen. Bring extra socks.”

“How far we going? The Andes?”

“It’s a surprise. Let’s move out.”

The post PseudoPod 596: Mysterium Tremendum – Part 3 appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Laird Barron
• Narrator : Jon Padgett
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Mysterium Tremendum” was originally published in Occultation and Other Stories in 2010.

Part 2 of 3

Listen to Part 1 here: http://pseudopod.org/2018/05/11/pseudopod-594-mysterium-tremendum-part-1/

More information on Blood Standard here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35464016-blood-standard

Mysterium Tremendum by Laird Barron

7.

Sequim (pronounced Skwim by the locals) was lovely that summer. The town rested near the Dungeness River at the heart of a shallow basin of the Dungeness-Sequim Valley and not far from the bay. Fields of lavender and poppies and tulips dominated the countryside. There were farms and mills and old, dusty roads that wound between wooden fences and stands of oak and birch and poplar trees. Raymond Carver wrote a poem about Sequim. I’d never read that one.

The post PseudoPod 595: Mysterium Tremendum – Part 2 appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Laird Barron
• Narrator : Jon Padgett
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Mysterium Tremendum” was originally published in Occultation and Other Stories in 2010.

Part 1 of 3

More information on Blood Standard here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35464016-blood-standard

Mysterium Tremendum by Laird Barron

1.

We bought supplies for our road trip  at an obscure general goods store in Seattle—a multi-generational emporium where you could purchase anything from space-age tents to snowshoes once worn by Antarctic explorers. That’s where we came across the guidebook.

Glenn found it on a low shelf in the rear of the shop, wedged between antique souvenir license plates and an out of print Jenkins’ Field Guide to Birds of Puget Sound. Fate is a strange and wondrous force—the aisles were dim and narrow and a large, elderly couple in muumuus was browsing the very shelf and it was time for us to go, but as I opened my mouth to suggest we head for the bar down the street, one of them, the man I think, bumped a rack of postcards and several items splatted on the floor. The man didn’t glance back as he walked away.

The post PseudoPod 594: Mysterium Tremendum – Part 1 appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Tamsyn Muir
• Narrator : A.J. Fitzwater
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

The Woman in the Hill was originally printed in Dreams from the Witch House and reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eight.

I grew up a few kilometres away from Waikopua Creek in what is today known as Whitford, and consider the New Zealand bushlands and rural existence very evocative of Lovecraftian horror: beautiful, but also isolating and impenetrable. “The Woman In The Hill” takes place in the landscape of Whitford and Turanga, in a time when that isolation would have been much more pronounced than it is today. For the sake of accuracy, the original New Zealand language and spelling has been maintained in this letter.

The Woman in the Hill by Tamsyn Muir

November 11, 1907

Elm Cottage, Turanga

Waikopua Creek, New Zealand

 

Dear Dorothy,

This is the last time I intend ever to write to you. Though you may take this letter as a freak or crank, I ask that you reconsider how likely it is that I would write such madness—that is, unless I knew it were the truth. In my need to convince you I will lay out the events using only fact—what I saw with my own eyes and have subsequently acted upon based on rational belief—and at the last, pray to God you believe me.

I know you heard the gossip and the insinuation surrounding my young friend Elizabeth W–. I will emphasise again her workaday nature and good common sense, not at all given to the morbid or fantastic, the model of a farmer’s wife. This concerns last April, when she had been recently married and had moved to the property opposite the old Broomfield slip. Regarding my silence on the scandal that surrounded her afterward, I may only defend myself by saying I thought it none of my business to relate.

It must have been eleven o’clock one summer’s night when I was startled from sleep by a fearful knocking. It was such a frenetic scraping and hammering that I would have been up and dressing at that alone, and with Kenneth’s gun, even had I not recognised Elizabeth calling for help. Her voice was so slurred that for a moment I thought her drunk, and when I let her in I thought worse. She was shivering and febrile in my kitchen for a long time—so unable to talk and so fearful that I half-convinced myself that the foolish rumours were true and we were under invasion by the M?ori. After a strong cup of tea and some whisky she told me this:

An old friend of hers had lived on the Peninsula and her sad story was well-known there. The husband worked in transporting wood down to the estuary and was often away and she left alone. This friend, Alice N—, missed a visit to Elizabeth one day, and the postman found the house empty. Everyone thought she had been called away and thought too little of it, but then the husband came back months later and found his wife gone and being a grim and miserable man made any number of accusations. It was a sad, short scandal. I did not think it unusual in this country, where English brides come to marry and then regret, but Elizabeth found it uncharacteristic and went herself to the Peninsula cottage. The house was shut up by then. The husband had left for Auckland and no trace of Alice remained. But the whole preyed on Elizabeth’s mind and she found something so unwholesome about the mystery that she determined to investigate.

It being early in the day, she took to the bush behind the house. I acknowledge that this would be foolish for most, but in Elizabeth’s defence it was dry weather, no chance of slips. She had enough bush-sense to know when she had to turn back. She was sufficiently suspicious but not so alarmed as to get assistance. She knew there was no danger in Clifton and certainly not from the local tribes. I cannot blame her for it now. She examined the back of the property and past the Waikopua into the hills. There was nothing of Alice—or it seemed so—and here, Elizabeth quit her story and let out a trill of laughter.

It made me jump; Dorothy, it was the awful laughter of a hysteric. She would not be calmed until I locked the door and lit the fire. When she looked at me her eyes were red as though she had been weeping, but there was not a tear-stain on her face. When more composed she told me that, deep in a hot and untidy part of the valley, she had seen a door in the hill—not the remnants of a p? or even an old raup? hut—but a door.

When I questioned her on this she described a portal—a cave entrance that had been propped with slabs of stone, one atop two others like a mantel, and that the stone had been crudely worked. The carvings did not resemble native carvings and Elizabeth could not really describe what they did resemble, except that they were ugly and looked as though they had been done in violence: as though someone had taken a chisel and scored cuts to no purpose. I gave her another blanket and I asked if she had gone inside.

Yes, naturally. She had prowled around the outside and found that the earth around did not crumble, and that the doorway was wide and tall and could have easily taken a man twice her breadth and size. I did not chide her for going inside, for I was too appalled and bewildered and she continued in a mutter and did not look up from her tea:

She had gone inside. She had found the passage quite spacious. She had meant to turn back once reaching the end of this corridor, but that it had made a steep turn and she had seen a light at the end: not torchlight, but the sickly radiance one sees in the Aranui grottoes. And it was not a cavern at all, she said, but made. I questioned her on this. Elizabeth did not answer. There were many corridors leading off from a main chamber and her assumption at this point was that she had found some horrid smuggling cave or tuckaway. There were things in the alcoves but she said she had not touched them and repeated this as though it was important, that she had not touched them.

All this time she had been calling for Alice and not listening, and then she became aware of a sound. It was the incessant lapping of water on stone. She pushed on down until she reached the cathedral-room of this catacomb, very high and square, and here there was a great pool of slow-moving water sloshing up against the rock. Here also there was a stone block she described as being about hip height and an enormous basin. Standing there was Alice, said Elizabeth. And after that she fled.

I was greatly puzzled, Dorothy. When I asked her to explain, Elizabeth began to shake again and would not drink, and she pushed off the blanket as though she were hot. She kept muttering catches of nonsense. She said that Alice was not right. Unwell, I asked, or somehow injured? No; but all the same she was not right. The two had talked, and Alice had claimed—and I confess the word gave me a thrill of strange horror—that she was imprisoned. Elizabeth could not say any more. Now indeed I thought that I had unearthed the source of all her misery—that in an uncharacteristic terror she had fled back out into the bush and the upper air, and left her friend behind. Now she was consumed by guilt and shame. I told her that I would fetch the men from Whitford Hall and we would go to the cave at once.

Dorothy, here Elizabeth screamed. Her voice was the idiot squeal of an animal. No! she said, no! It was too late, Alice had gone now. Elizabeth crawled from her chair and kneeled in front of me and clawed at my floorboards beyond reason until I saw her fingernails split, and she cried out again and what she said made me afraid in all the ways it should have made me pity her hysteria:

“But I’m here—tell me I’m here, Caroline—for the love of God, keep me here!”

I gave her what comfort I could give a madwoman, put her in the spare bedroom and sent for her husband at first light. Come morning she was so weary that she was biddable, though also hollow-eyed and stupid, like a dreamer waking in a strange room. Looking back—the madness in me to let her go!—but what choice did I have? It was nonsense. She had experienced a cruel scare for someone else’s benefit, or a nightmare of the subconscious, or some other sad and inexplicable reason that would come to light eventually. She needed rest and not pandering. Yet as she was led away my palms were tight and hot, for there was a look in her eyes that is inane to describe, yet I must describe it: it was the dead terror of a man before the Pit.

Time lulled me into an uneasy security. My evenings never recovered. I had even ventured with Elizabeth one hot day to the Peninsula, in order to lay her fears to final rest, though she startled like a white-eyed colt the whole venture. Naturally, there was no door. We re-traced her steps and found the valley she had come to in her story, and there was nothing but dead trunks of the rough tree fern where a door had been in her memory. I even pushed hard at the earth and scrabbled around at the rocks to show there was nothing beneath, but at this she shuddered and pulled at my sleeves to stop.

“Don’t! Lord, don’t, Caroline,” she said lowly. “We’ll find nothing.”

The next three months I heard from her seldom and after six I heard nothing at all. She had grown increasingly withdrawn and was “out” to callers when neighbours knew perfectly well she was in, and would plead migraines when it came to the monthly church meeting, even though she had been such a pillar of the Christian Women’s Society. She returned my letters in a cursory fashion, then stopped altogether, and I felt such a curious admixture of rebuff and relief that I became derelict in my duty and quit all attempts. I had not written for two months before I realised she was gone. Her husband had been too mad with worry and pain to think of singling me out in the scandal. His mare had returned without her on it, rolling its eyes and nearly dead with sweat, and that was all he knew.

How could I voice my suspicions? I could barely voice them to myself. It seemed the saddest and most likely happenstance was that Elizabeth, wasted from months of nerves, had come to grief alone in the Bush; that spectres and nightmares had led to her death, but the sort that were immaterial, borne from anxiety. I told this to myself every evening and morning and scourged my thoughts of that benighted valley—that squatting, phylacteric depression, that mad hallucination of a waiting door—ready for grief to take its rightful place and forgetfulness to come after.

Grief and distance did not mount their rightful thrones. My nights were pitiable, Dorothy, my days worse. I have lived forty years and not let morbidity touch me, I have never maundered or taken freaks, yet I could not escape imaginings of a darkened door, Elizabeth struggling down filth-smeared corridors in the dark, Elizabeth as waxen and afraid as she was the day I set to the side of the hill. I was sleeping with the door barred and with Kenneth’s gun. I would wait by the window in the most profound darkness and watch for some figure to crest the hill—Elizabeth’s, or faceless Alice’s, they were all one. Perhaps you are now saying to yourself, “Caroline, you should have sent for the doctor and diagnosed a guilty conscience.” But guilt had never troubled me either.

That June, I made for the Peninsula. The hills were grey and wet with drizzle. I had left a note explaining where I had gone, to be picked up by the postman if I did not retrieve it before morning. I had made sensible arrangements. I had supplies. Thus fortified, I went to the valley where I had gone with Elizabeth, to a slanted part of the hill, in a clinging mist—and sunk between the cringing branches of fern was a door.

It was made of two slabs of violently worked stone with a third sitting on top. The earth around this stone was churned and grey, with fresh gouges cut out of the hillside. My lamp made little impression on those clouded shadows within, instead bouncing the darkness to and fro. When I looked more closely at the carvings I found them grotesque, forming faces the one minute, then meaningless gibberish the next, somehow aggressively gross and foul. I examined them little. Like Elizabeth before me, I chose to make my way down that long, breathless passage to the bowels of the hill.

The corridor was so steep that I had to hold my lamp at waist height to descend. And it would suddenly zig-zag—break off at an angle, double in on itself, more of a passage laid down by a burrowing creature than one by an architect—so that I scraped myself badly on irregularities in the wall, for I am a bigger woman than Elizabeth. I held out my lamp to them at one point and was repulsed. They seemed like meaningless notches until I pulled back to see them in toto, and there I saw the repeated graffito of a figure in chains. I thought it was a patterned line of yoked animals, each holding the beast ahead’s tail in its jaws, but the carving was an undeveloped scribble. The animals continued on and on and down the stairs in their endless march. Their eyes bulged and their manes tangled in their teeth. It was not worth looking at. A final drastic descent forced my eyes away from the carvings and to attend the more urgent business of not breaking my neck.

The bottom level opened up into a narrow room with eight sides. An alcove was set into each, with each alcove pock-marked with niches. An archway led into the dark main artery and a half-arch into two connecting rooms. My lamplight was increasingly sulky despite the fresh oil and wick, and in this light, like Elizabeth had, I took the whole for a smuggler’s den. Inside each niche was an irregularly wrapped bundle of rough sacking or crudely pounded flax.

I took my knife and eased out one of the bundles, not liking the greasy sacking or the oily stains it left on my fingers. If there had been filthy remains in there I might have been less disturbed than I was by what I found: an unfamiliar calico dress, with a blouse, jacket and boots. A quick slash of another bundle proved to similarly hold a woman’s clothes, neatly folded. The next room was so peppered with niches it looked like a beehive, and each contained more of these effects. Some of the clothes were of an antiquated style. One bundle held a fibrous patterned wrapper such as some M?ori still wear. My guttering lamp hinted at more chambers ahead—more chambers, and deeper, that I never visited—alcove upon alcove, and God knows they were all probably full.

I took my lamp away from those miserable artefacts. Trophies, I thought then, pointing to some grotesque kidnapping or slavery spree.

I continued on down the main passage. It sloped down sharply and I had to press on the ice-cold, slippery walls in order not to lose my footing. The final descent took me to an enormous chamber, Dorothy, as Elizabeth had described, only more vast and empty and black than she could ever have communicated. I set my lamp down and it shuddered and spluttered in the face of such enormous shadow. Here I became aware of the hush only a great and quiet body of water can make. My sight slowly adjusted to some dim braziers filled with what looked like greenish coals—flameless and crawling, moving independently of each other somehow—and the light cast weird ripples on a pool of wide, drear, fathomless water. The light also fell upon a great stone slab where the water sloshed down into carved channels and washed about its base, and fell on a basin big enough for a child to curl up inside it, and it fell also on my friend Elizabeth.

But not Elizabeth’s miserable corpse: Elizabeth alive and well and living, Elizabeth as fresh as though she had come through the door with me.

“Oh, Caroline, thank God,” she said, as naturally as ever. More naturally, even, than she had been of months previous; something like her of old, with that same familiar ease. But it was wrong, Dorothy. I cannot describe, as she could not describe either. It was dim in that room but I could see the stark whites of her eyes and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. “What a relief you came.”

Of course I asked her if she was all right, if she was hurt in any way; she gave me a brief, almost lipless smile, and this was not an expression I had ever seen her wear. She denied injury. She was fine, she said; she’d tell me all about it later. What was important was that I could let her out.

I asked her why she needed to be let out and she said she couldn’t get out alone. I couldn’t see why not, as it wasn’t as though the corridors were so labyrinthine and nothing seemed to bar her. The water washed close to her bare brown feet. I grew impatient. I demanded to know where had she been and by what means was she now here, in the very place she had feared most?

“Caroline,” she said calmly, “I never left.”

Then she walked toward me. I cannot write clearly of how she moved because every time I think of it my head pounds and my nose often bleeds. But yet she moved and the manner in which her bones shifted inside her skin, and in contrast to how you or I would move—

I believe there is a part of the mind that decides upon courses of action without requiring conscious thought. I also believe that these are left over from the antique days when Man was preyed upon, before cities and civilization. I told you I had been sensible, Dorothy; it was a matter of conscious decision that I had brought Kenneth’s gun. But it was on this aforementioned instinct that I lifted it, took aim, and shot Elizabeth dead.

I did not wait around to see her fall. I could rely upon my accuracy. I fled into the lapping darkness while all around me the sound of water filled my ears—deafened, driven mad by a sound I did not know if I was conjuring up, desperate to find light as a swimmer to break water. I scrambled up the narrow steps and through the angular shaft, convinced that if I stopped to heave for breath or look over my shoulder I would meet my end.

Did I murder a young woman, or did I avenge her? Did she die there down in the dark, Dorothy, or is the very idea I could have killed her a laughable one? Perhaps it would have been cleverer to search in those insidious bundles until I found the one that had been hers. Certainly everything down there should have been burnt. But not by my hand, Dorothy, not by any hand I have met in this life, I think, nor yours. What is down there should not be sought, not even for purposes of expurgation.

That place showed itself to me in my dreams and did not leave me after waking; it simply widened its window to the very edges of my vision. I have seen the cave and the water and the altar constantly since then. Even if I take the medicine that the doctor prescribed, the one to help me sleep, it never comes to any good. I was never a beauty but I have grown twisted and haggard for lack of peace. It’s little wonder that they all think I am ill. At least I have no husband to wonder at my malaise and my megrims, like poor Elizabeth’s. I may sit and tremble alone every time I think a door in my house creaks open. I never go anywhere without Kenneth’s gun now. It sits next to me as I write.

And yet I know I must go back. I will go back. I have held on this long, but it has been unbearable suffering. I have concluded that the door is a disease and that the act of passing through its foetid dark is enough to invalid one. Perhaps I had nothing to fear from what Elizabeth had become. I am not sure. Maybe you are not meant to go back until the place is ready for you and your own alcove is empty. I am ready now: last night I took all the drugs Dr. Miller had left and I still woke at the end of my garden, digging at a slope there with my bare and bleeding hands. I will not sleep again.

Dorothy, I took that place with me. It is inside me now. Whosoever is its master is well-versed in claiming victims. You are the one to whom I may try to communicate it and therefore, I will warn you before I succumb. You must not come. The only woman you may save now is yourself. You have been a rare friend and correspondent. If you deem me a madwoman I won’t care, just so long as you stay in town and never set foot in Turanga. It is too much like you to come and investigate if I disappeared from hearing. If I present you the facts to begin with, it may quell your desire to procure them. Do not come. This is not your mystery.

I do not know my purpose. I do not know what I am to be, nor Elizabeth, nor Alice—those numberless alcoves, Dorothy, where have we gone? Elizabeth was the merest child. The cruelties it could do with you I cannot imagine. When I think of how she moved—this country is so new to us and so old to the world, and its emptiness should have been a warning rather than an invitation—there are terrible things in the darkness and I will not let you become another of them.

My final wish is this: that you respect our long friendship in the face of derangement. Do not come. Do not question. Live a long life and go into the hills as seldom as possible. Remember me kindly and for my sake, remember Elizabeth kindly, and for hers a woman called Alice and hundreds else. We passed through the door. We have been trapped and set loose. I wish to be the last.

If by awful chance you see the door—if it comes to you invidiously in its defiled stone and darkness—the entrance to the water and to the holes where we go, you must think of me within. Then use dynamite.

 

I remained Your faithful friend Caroline B—.

This letter was found concealed in the effects of Auckland resident Dr. Dorothy L—, eight months after her May 1908 disappearance.

The post PseudoPod 593: The Woman in the Hill appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Dirck de Lint
• Narrator : Rish Outfield
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 592: Free Balloons for All Good Children is a PseudoPod original.

• Blink
• RoadKill
• Desserts

“This story came about because the balloon described in it drifted past my window at work.

Because a balloon floating five feet off the ground on a grey day in early October is so unlikely, my first thought was naturally that it was something horrible up to no good at all. It went away… eventually, after hanging around near a bus stop for far longer than seemed quite right. I don’t know what it was actually up to, but I’d like to thank the mystery balloon for the inspiration it provided.

The story was also an attempt to exorcise a vapour I developed about seven years ago– what if I become incapacitated while I’m the only parent on hand for my tender tot? I’m sorry to report that the exorcism has not really worked.”

Free Balloons for All Good Children by Dirck de Lint

Tom gave the stroller a little nudge to turn Danny out of the sun.  Danny responded by wriggling around under the straps to put himself as much in the sun as possible.  Tom smiled at this, and found that he couldn’t really blame his son.  The day was a little chilly for so late in May, and if he was enjoying the warmth of the sun it stood to reason that Danny would, too.  He was very close to just putting the stroller back the way it had been.  There was some uncertainty in his heart, though, about how far Danny could be trusted to look out for his own safety even now that he was above a year old.  When, he wondered, did they stop staring right at the sun if given a chance?

Danny underlined the thought by pulling his hat off and flinging it toward the grass next to the park bench.

“C’mon, kid,” Tom said, leaning over to reach for the hat.  “Daddy wants to enjoy his lunch, too.”

Tom had fed Danny before they left; diced carrots and chicken, and their inevitable fallout, were best dealt with at home. Now Tom could enjoy a sandwich in the open air, while Danny waved at flowers and sang in his own secret language. When the sandwich was done, Tom’s plan was that he and Danny would finish their walk to the park’s playground, where he would push The Best Son In The World on the swings until either the boy or his diaper had had enough.

“Da!”  Danny leaned forward in his stroller, arms outstretched, and Tom followed his line of sight to see what was so interesting.  There was a balloon drifting toward them, the cool breeze urging it slowly along.  “Da!  Gib!”

The consonant was not quite there, but Tom recognized the command.  He sat a moment longer, considering the balloon while he chewed the current mouthful.  It was the basic round sort of balloon, a medium blue with pale five-pointed stars on it which had probably been silver before inflation.  It trailed a salmon-coloured ribbon from its stem, the curled end hanging about the height of his own waist above the park’s grass.

It was an odd thing to see, Tom thought, a balloon scudding along at a constant altitude.  He had never seen an untethered helium balloon which had not raced up and away.  One of his own earliest memories was of a red balloon his grandmother had given him, receding upward to become a mere dot against a bright summer sky.  Perhaps the coolness of the day was affecting the buoyancy of this one, or perhaps it was an old balloon near the end of its wandering, interior pressure low.

“Gib!  Gib me! Gib!”  Tom looked at his son, the little face radiant with glee and innocent desire.  The stroller was ballasted by a diaper bag crammed with toddler requisites, virtually eliminating any chance of it tipping as Danny reached out, so Tom watched and waited.  It seemed that the balloon might come right to Danny’s hand as it sloped along across the grass, almost as if it were tacking on the breeze to obey the child’s summons.

The moment before it was close enough for Danny to grab, there was a little gust which shoved it to the far side of the stroller.  Danny strained for it so vigorously that Tom put a hand on the nearer arm-rest to steady it, while the curling ribbon rotated so that it was very nearly grazed by the questing little fingers before it was swept past.

“Da! Da! Gib!”  Danny was twisting in the seat, a note of desperation entering his voice.  Tom rose, setting his sandwich down on its wax paper, next to the thermos.

“Hang on, buddy.  Daddy will get it.”  He gave the stroller a little turn, so that Danny could better witness his father’s heroics.  It took only a couple of steps and he could stretch out his left hand to snatch the ribbon.  Smiling, he turned to hand the oddly literal windfall to his son, who clapped in delight and laughed the purely joyful laugh of his age.

Tom found his turn suddenly arrested, his left arm wrenched backward.  But no, not backward… upward.  He looked up at the balloon, saw no apparent change in it except that its ribbon was twanging taut as it somehow lifted with enough force to make him uncertain in his footing.  His feet slipping a little on the ground, he released his grip more by instinct than thought.

His hand did not open.  His thumb came away from the top of his index finger, but the fingers remained closed, sticking to the ribbon like a tongue on an icy pole.  Almost immediately, when he was no longer actively gripping the ribbon, he felt the skin of his palm and fingers slide across the flesh underneath and he heard a tiny velvet rip from inside his unwilling fist.  He screamed at the pain that ran down his arm ahead of the tiny trickle of blood.

It was instinct again that sent his right hand to reach up, to try and pull himself free.  Thought raced after instinct this time, stopping him just before he grabbed the ribbon, freezing him with the sudden realization that he would then have both hands stuck fast to this monstrous trap.  In that moment of hesitation, with both arms upraised, he saw the end of the ribbon hanging below his bloody fist, the part that had not touched skin but only the cuff of his jacket, begin groping sideways, almost beckoning the free hand.  He snatched his right arm down.

He looked around the park.  Toward the lot where he had left the car, there was no one.  In the other direction, a hedge made all the parents in the playground indistinct.  No one there would hear him calling for help over the sounds of their own children playing.  He hesitated to move, fearful that he might manage to launch himself.  Beside him was Danny, who was still looking up at the balloon in gleeful anticipation, his little teeth gleaming in a delighted smile, his little hands both raised to take the treat from his father.

The pain in Tom’s hand and arm was all but extinguished by the thought of what would have happened but for the flirt of wind which kept those tiny, tender hands from clapping onto the drifting ribbon.  Tom was a tall man and overweight with it, and the thing was almost able to lift him.

That thought cutting through the pain allowed other thoughts in its wake.  He remembered the Swiss army knife he carried, along with his keys, in his pocket.  His right-hand pocket, a realization which brought such relief that he uttered a single sob as he fished it out.

Danny began shouting “Gib! Gib!” with increasing urgency.  Tom took a careful step away from the stroller, trying one-handed to open the big blade on the knife.  It tumbled from his grasp, falling end-on to the walkway, leaving shards of red plastic on the pavement as it bounced into the short grass under the bench.

He slowly dropped to his knees, the act of dragging the balloon down after him bringing new waves of agony to his palm and making his breath come short and quick.  He scrabbled for the knife, peering through the slats of the bench, blinking away tears.  He almost knocked it further back, to where he would have to bend even lower or crawl to the back of the bench to get it, but got a finger on it and pinned it where he could, with a small stretch, get his hand around it.

Danny was starting to whine, working up to crying.  He was struggling to get loose from the stroller again, alternately pushing against it and reaching out toward the balloon.  Now that Tom was kneeling, the ribbon was at a convenient height for Danny, and he strove to reach it with all his might.

Tom braced the knife against the leg of the bench, and managed to lever the blade out.  He found he had cut his index finger on its second joint at some point in the process, a deep cut which bled freely and which he could hardly feel at all over the greater pain in the other hand.  Gritting his teeth, he hauled down on the ribbon, bending his arm at the elbow so he could reach to cut the ribbon without the ribbon reaching him.

He had a momentary thought of pulling down far enough that he could stab the balloon.  That was followed by dark imaginings and flashes of awful prescience.  His face would touch the ribbon.  He would slip, fall sideways, and tangle Danny in it.  The balloon would pop at the touch of the knife to shower him and Danny with something unspeakable.  He shook off the notion, and began to slice at the rigid salmon line above his hand.

The ribbon was tough, and the trailing end was definitely trying for his right hand as he worried at it with the knife.  Danny was shrieking now, words forgotten, his face contorted with frustrated rage.  The wheels of the stroller left the ground, left side then right, as the child jerked against the belts that held him.

At last the ribbon parted, a thick dribble of something warm and looking like greenish mustard running onto the blade and the fingers of Tom’s right hand.  The stub above his fist fell onto the backs of his fingers where it stuck instantly, and he held his arm out to the side as the trailing end coiled and writhed.  The balloon shot upward, a dark replay of his childhood memory.  Danny howled, no longer reaching up, merely watching the object of his desire escape.

Tom looked at his left hand.  Blood seeped from under his fingers, forming fat slow drops that fell onto the pavement or rolled to join the stain on his cuff.  He could not slow his breathing.  His whole arm felt raw.  The quivering of pain and exhaustion still animated the remaining loose curl of ribbon, but it seemed to no longer move on its own.

He lurched behind the stroller, grabbing one handle with the stained hand which still held the knife, looping his left thumb onto the other.  He trotted toward the car, wanting to get into the shelter it offered, wanting to use its hands-free features to call for help; his phone was in his left hip pocket, and he could not think of any way to reach it.

As he went, he glanced back at the bench.  Beyond it, the air was thick with balloons, all slowly drifting toward the playground.  His screams blended with Danny’s as his trot became a dash.

The post PseudoPod 592: Free Balloons for All Good Children appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Clark Ashton-Smith
• Narrator : Dr. Hal
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producers : Kiko Aumond, Marty Perrett and Shawn Garrett
• Discuss on Forums

“The Plutonian Drug” was first published in Amazing Stories, September 1934

“The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil” was first published in Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose in 1922

• The MothMan Prophies
• Sapphire & Steel
• The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt
• In The Mouth of Madness
• The New Gods
• Santa Monica by EverClear

The drone used in “The Plutonian Drug” was Cerebral Cortex (Drone Mix) by Parvus Decree available and used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license from the Free Music Archive. No changes were made to the piece.  Available at the following link

The music used in “The Hashish Eater” was “Last Rites Of Amduscias” by Turmoil available and used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 from the Free Music Archive. No changes were made to the piece.  Available at the following link

The Plutonian Drug  by Clark Ashton Smith

‘It is remarkable.’ said Dr. Manners, ‘how the scope of our pharmacopoeia has been widened by interplanetary exploration. In the past thirty years, hundreds of hitherto unknown substances, employable as drugs or medical agents, have been found in the other worlds of our own system. It will be interesting to see what the Allan Farquar expedition will bring back from the planets of Alpha Centauri when — or if — it succeeds in reaching then and returning to earth. I doubt, though, if anything more valuable than selenine will be discovered. Selenine, derived from a fossil lichen found by the first rocket-expedition to the moon in 1975, has, as you know, practically wiped out the old-time curse of cancer. In solution, it forms the base of an infallible serum, equally useful for cure or prevention.’

‘I fear I haven’t kept up on a lot of the new discoveries,’ said Rupert Balcoth the sculptor, Manners’ guest, a little apologetically. ‘Of course, everyone has heard of selenine. And I’ve seen frequent mention, recently, of a mineral water from Ganymede whose effects are like those of the mythical Fountain of Youth.’

‘You mean clithni, as the stuff is called by the Ganymedians. It is a clear, emerald liquid, rising in lofty geysers from the craters of quiescent volcanoes. Scientists believe that the drinking of clithni is the secret of the almost fabulous longevity of the Ganymedians; and they think that it may prove to be a similar elixir for humanity.’

‘Some of the extraplaaetary drugs haven’t been so beneficial to mankind, have they? ‘ queried Balcoth. ‘I seem to have heard of a Martian poison that has greatly facilitated the gentle art of murder. And I am told that mnophka, the Venerian narcotic, is far worse, in its effects on the human system, than is any terrestrial alkaloid.’

‘Naturally,’ observed the doctor with philosophic calm, ‘many of these new chemical agents are capable of due abuse. They share that liability with any number of our native drugs. Man, as ever; has the choice of good and evil… I suppose that the Martian poison you speak of is akpaloli, the juice of a common russet-yellow weed that grows in the oases of Mars. It is colorless, and without taste or odor. It kills almost instantly, leaving no trace, and imitating closely the symptoms of heart-disease. Undoubtedly many people have been made away with by means of a surreptitious drop of akpaloli in their food or medicine. But even akpaloli, if used in infinitesimal doses, is a very powerful stimulant, useful in cases of syncope, and serving, not infrequently to re-animate victims of paralysis in a quite miraculous manner.

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there is an infinite lot still to be learned about many of these ultra-terrene substances. Their virtues have often been discovered quite by accident — and in some cases, the virtue is still to be discovered.

‘For example, take mnophka, which you mentioned a little while ago. Though allied in a way, to the earthnarcotics, such as opium and hashish, it is of little use for anaesthetic or anodyne purposes. Its chief effects are an extraordinary acceleration of the time-sense, and a heightening and telescoping of all sensations, whether pleasurable or painful. The user seems to be living and moving at a furious whirlwind rate — even though he may in reality be lying quiescent on a couch. He exists in a headlong torrent of sense-impressions, and seems, in a few minutes, to undergo the experiences of years. The physical result is lamentable — a profound exhaustion, and an actual aging of the tissues, such as would ordinarily require the period of real time which the addict has “lived” through merely in his own illusion.

‘There are some other drugs, comparatively little known, whose effects, if possible, are even more curious than those of mnophka. I don’t suppose you have ever heard of plutonium?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ admitted Balcoth. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘I can do even better than that — I can show you some of the stuff, though it isn’t much to look at — merely a fine white powder.’

Dr. Manners rose from the pneumatic-cushioned chair in which he sat facing his guest, and went to a large cabinet of synthetic ebony, whose shelves were crowded with flasks, bottles, tubes, and cartons of various sizes and forms. Re turning, he handed to Balcoth a squat and tiny vial, twothirds filled with a starchy substance.

‘Plutonium,’ explained Manners, ‘as its name would indicate, comes from forlom, frozen Pluto, which only one terrestrial expedition has so far visited — the expedition led by the Cornell brothers, John and Augustine, which started in 1990 and did not return to earth till 1996, when nearly everyone had given it up as lost. John, as you may have heard, died during the returning voyage, together with half the personnel of the expedition: and the others reached earth with only one reserve oxygen-tank remaining.

This vial contains about a tenth of the existing supply of plutonium. Augustine Cornell, who is an old schoolfriend of mine gave it to me three years ago, just before he embarked with the Allan Farquar crowd. I count myself pretty lucky to own anything so rare.

‘The geologists of the party found the stuff when they began prying beneath the solidified gases that cover the surface of that dim, starlit planet, in an effort to learn a little about its composition and history. They couldn’t do much under the circumstances, with limited time and equipment; but they made some curious discoveries — of which plutonium was far from being the least.

‘Like selenine, the stuff is a bi-product of vegetable fossilization. Doubtless it is many billion years old, and dates back to the time when Pluto possessed enough internal heat to make possible the development of certain rudimentary plant-forms on its blind surface. It must have had an atmosphere then; though no evidence of former animal-life was found by the Cornells.

‘Plutonium, in addition to carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, contains minute quantities of several unclassified elements. It was discovered in a crystalloid condition, but turned immediately to the fine powder that you see, as soon as it was exposed to air in the rocketship. It is readily soluble in water, forming a permanent colloid, without the least sign of deposit, no matter how long it remains in suspension.’

‘You say it is a drug?’ queried Balcoth. ‘What does it do to you?’

‘I’ll come to that in a minute — though the effect is pretty hard to describe. The properties of the stuff were discovered by chance: on the return journey from Pluto, a member of the expedition, half delirious with space-fever, got hold of the unmarked jar containing it and took a small dose, imagining that it was bromide of potassium. It served to complicate his delirium for a while — since it gave him some brand-new ideas about space and time.

‘Other people have experimented with it since then. The effects are quite brief (the influence never lasts more than half an hour) and they vary considerably with the individual. There is no bad aftermath, either neural, mental, or physical, as far as anyone has been able to determine. I’ve taken it myself, once or twice, and can testify to that.

‘Just what it does to one, I am not sure. Perhaps it merely produces a derangement or metamorphosis of sensations, like hashish; or perhaps it serves to stimulate some rudimentary organ, some dormant sense of the human brain. At any rate there is, as clearly as I can put it, an altering of the perception of time — of actual duration — into a sort of space-perception. One sees the past, and also the future, in relation to one’s own physical self, like a landscape stretching away on either hand. You don’t see very far, it is true -merely the events of a few hours in each direction; but it’s a very curious experience; and it helps to give you a new slant on the mystery of time and space. It is altogether different from the delusions of mnophka.’

‘It sounds very interesting,’ admitted Balcoth. ‘However, I’ve never tampered much vith narcotics myself; though I did experiment once or twice, in my young, romantic days with cannabis Indica. I had been reading Gautiet and Baudelaire, I suppose. Anyway, the result was rather disappointing.’

‘You didn’t take it long enough for your system to absorb a residuum of the drug, I imagine,’ said Manners. ‘Thus the effects were negligible, from a visionary standpoint, But plutonium is altogether different — you get the maximum result from the very first dose. I think it would interest you greatly, Balcoth, since you are a sculptor by profession: you would see some unusual plastic images, not easy to render in terms of Euclidean planes and angles. I’d gladly give you a pinch of it now, if you’d care to experiment.’

‘You’re pretty generous, aren’t you, since the stuff is so rare?’

‘I’m not being generous at all. For years, I’ve planned to write a monograph on ultra-terrestrial narcotics; and you might give me some valuable data. With your type of brain and your highly developed artistic sense, the visions of plutonium should be uncommonly clear and significant. All I ask is, that you describe them to me as fully as you can afterwards.’

‘Very well,’ agreed Balcoth. ‘I’ll try anything once.’ His curiosity was inveigled, his imagination seduced, by Manner’s account of the remarkable drug.

Manners brought out an antique whisky-glass, which he filled nearly to the rim with some golden-red liquid. Uncorking the vial of plutonium, he added to this fluid a small pinch of the fine white powder, which dissolved immediately and without effervescence.

‘The liquid is a wine made from a sweet Martian tuber known as ovvra,’ he explained. ‘It is light and harmless, and will counteract the bitter taste of the plutonium. Drink, it quickly and then lean back in your chair.’

Balcoth hesitated, eyeing the golden-red fluid.

‘Are you quite sure the effects will wear off as promptly as you say?’ he questioned. ‘It’s a quarter past nine now, and I’ll have to leave about ten to keep an appointment with one of my patrons at the Belvedere Club. It’s the billionaire, Claud Wishhaven. who wants me to do a bas-relief in pseudo-jade and neo-jasper for the hall of his country mansion. He wants something really advanced and futuristic. We’re to talk it over tonight — decide on the motifs, etc.’

“That gives you forty-five minutes,” assured the doctor — ‘and in thirty, at the most your brain and senses will be perfectly normal again. I’ve never known it to fail. You’ll have fifteen minutes to spare, in which to tell me all about your sensations.’

Balcoth emptied the little antique glass at a gulp and leaned back, as Manners had directed, on the deep pneumatic cushions of the chair; He seemed to be falling easily but endlessly into a mist that had gathered in the room with unexplainable rapidity; and through this mist he was dimly aware that Manners had taken the empty glass from his relaxing fingers. He saw the face of Manners far above him, small and blurred, as if in some tremendous perspective of alpine distance; and the doctor’s simple action seemed to be occurring in another world.

He continued to fall and float through eternal mist, in which all things were dissolved as in the primordial nebulae of chaos. After a timeless interval, the mist which had been uniformly gray and hueless at first, took on a flowing iridescence, never the same for two successive moments; and the sense of gentle falling turned to a giddy revolution, as if he were caught in an ever-accelerating vortex.

Coincidentally with his movement in this whirlpool of prismatic splendor, he seemed to undergo an indescribable mutation of the senses. The whirling colors, by subtle, ceaseless gradations, became recognizable as solid forms. Emerging, as if by an act of creation, from the infinite chaos, they appeared to take their place in an equally infinite vista. The feeling of movement, through decrescent spirals, was resolved into absolute immobility. Balcoth was no Ionger conscious of himself as a living organic body: he was an abstract eye, a discorporate center of visual awareness, stationed alone in space, and yet having an intimate relationship with the frozen prospect on which he peered from his ineffable vantage.

Without surprise, he found that he was gazing simultaneously in two directions. On either hand, for a vast distance that was wholly void of normal perspective, a weird and peculiar landscape stretched away, traversed by an unbroken frieze or bas-relief of human figures that ran like a straight undeviating wall.

For awhile, the frieze was incomprehensible to Balcoth, he could make nothing of its glacial, flowing outlines with their background of repeated masses and complicated angles and sections of other human friezes that approached or departed, often in a very abrupt manner, from an unseen world beyond. Then the vision seemed to resolve and clarify itself, and he began to understand.

The bas-relief, he saw, was composed entirely of a repetition of his own figure; plainly distinct as the separate waves of a stream, and possessing a stream-like unity. Immediately before him, and for some distance on either hand. the figure was seated in a chair — the chair itself being subject to the same billowy repetition. The background was composed of the reduplicated figure of Dr. Manners, in another chair; and behind this, the manifold images of a medicine cabinet and a section of wall-paneling.

Following the vista on what, for lack of any better name, might be termed the left hand, Balcoth saw himself in the act of draining the antique glass, with Manners standing before him. Then, still further, he saw himself previous to this, with a background in which Manners was presenting him the glass, was preparing the dose of plutonium, was going to the cabinet for the vial, was rising from his pneumatic chair. Every movement, every attitude of the doctor and himself during their past conversation, was visioned in a sort of reverse order, reaching away, unalterable as a wall of stone sculpture, into the weird, eternal landscape. There was no break in the continuity of his own figure; but Manners seemed to disappear at times, as if into a fourth dimension. These times, he remembered later, were the occasions whem the doctor had not been in his line of vision. The perception was wholly visual; and though Balcoth saw his own lips and those of Manner’s parted in movements of speech, he could hear no word or other sound.

Perhaps the most singular feature of the vision was the utter absence of foreshortening. Though Balcoth seemed to behold it all from a fixed, immovable point, the landscape and the intersecting frieze presented themselves to him without diminution, maintaiaing a frontal fullness and distinctness to a distance that might have been many miles.

Continuing along the left-hand vista, he saw himself entering Manners’ apartments, and then encountered his image standing in the elevator that had borne him to the ninth floor of the hundred story hotel in which Manners lived. Then the frieze appeared to have an open street for background, with a confused, everchanging multitude of other faces and forms, of vehicles and sections of buildings, all jumbled together as in some old-time futuristic painting. Some of these details were full and clear, and others were cryptically broken,and blurred, so as to be scarcely recognizable. Everything, whatever its spatial position and relation, was re-arranged in the flowing frozen stream of this temporal pattern.

Balcoth retraced the three blocks from Manners’ hotel to his own studio, seeing all his past movements, whatever their direction in tri-dimensional space, as a straight line in the time-dimemion. At last he was in his studio; and there the frieze of his own figure receded into the eerie prospect of space-transmuted time among other friezes formed of actual sculptures. He beheld himself giving the final touches with his chisel to a symbolic statue at the afternoon’s end, with a glare of ruddy sunset falling through an unseen window and flushing the pallid marble. Beyond this there was a reverse fading of the glow, a thickening and blurring of the half-chiselled features of the image, a female form to which he had given the tentative name of Oblivion. At length, among half-seen statuary, the left-hand vista became indistinct, and melted slowly in amorphous mist. He had seen his own life as a continuous glaciated stream, stretching for about five hours into the past.

Reaching away on the right hand, he saw the vista of the fature. Here there was a continuation of his seated figure under the influence of the drug, opposite the continued basrelief of Dr. Manners and the repeated cabinet and wallpanels. After a considerable interval, he beheld himself in the act of rising from the chair. Standing erect, he seemed to be talking awhile, as in some silent antique film, to the listening doctor. After that, he was shaking hands with Manners, was leaving the apartment, was descending in the lift and following the open brightly-lighted street toward the Belvedere Club where he was to keep his appointment with Claud Wishhaven.

The Club was only three blocks away, on another street; and the shortest route, after the first block, was along a narrow alley between an office building and a warehouse. Balcoth had meant to take this alley; and in his vision, he saw the bas-relief of his future figure passing along the straight pavement with a background of deserted doorways and dim walls that towered from sight against the extinguished stars.

He seemed to be alone: there were no passers — only the silent, glimmering endlessly repeated angles of arc-lit walls and windows that accompanied his repeated figure. He saw himself following the alley, like a stream in some profound canyon; and there midway, the strange vision came to an abrupt inexplicable end, without the gradual blurring into formless mist, that had marked his retrospective view of the past.

The sculpture-like frieze with its architectural ground appeared to terminate, broken off clean and sharp, in a gulf of immeasurable blackness and nullity. The last wave-like duplication of his own person, the vague doorway beyond it, the glimmering alley-pavement, all were seen as if shorn asunder by a falling sword of darkness, leaving a vertical line of cleavage beyond which there was — nothing.

Balcoth had a feeling of utter detachment from himself, an eloignment from the stream of time, from the shores of space, in some abstract dimension. The experience, in its full realization, might have lasted for an instant only — or for eternity. Without wonder, without curiosity or reflection, like a fourth-dimensional Eye, he viewed simultaneously the unequal cross-sections of his own past and future.

After that timeless interval of complete perception, there began a reverse process of change. He, the all-seeing eye, aloof in super-space, was aware of movement, as if he were drawn back by some subtle thread of magnetism into the dungeon of time and space from which he had momentarily departed. He seemed to be following the frieze of his own seated body toward the right, with a dimly felt rhythm or pulsation in his movement that corresponded to the merging duplications of the figure. With curious clearness, he realized that the time-unit, by which these duplications were determined, was the beating of his own heart.

Now with accelerative swiftness, the vision of petrific form and space was re-dissolving into a spiral swirl of multitudinous colors, through which he was drawn upward. Presently he came to himself, seated in the pneumatic chair, with Dr. Manners opposite. The room seemed to waver a little, as if with some lingering touch of the weird transmutation; and webs of spinning iris hung in the corners of his eyes. Apart from this, the effect of the drug had wholly vanished, leaving, however, a singularly clear and vivid memory of the almost ineffable experience.

Dr. Manners began to question him at once, and Balcoth described his visionary sensations as fully and graphically as he could.

‘There is one thing I don’t understand,’ said Manners at the end with a puzzled frown. ‘According to your account, you must have seen five or six hours of the past, running in a straight spatial line, as a sort of continuous landscape; but the vista of the future ended sharply after you had followed it for three-quarters of an hour; or less. I’ve never known the drug to act so unequally: the past and future perspectives have always been about the same in their extent for others who have used plutoninum.’

‘Well,’ observed Balcoth, ‘the reaI marvel is that I could see into the future at all. In a way, I can understand the vision of the past. It was clearly composed of physical memories — of all my recent movements; and the background was formed of all the impressions my optic nerves had received during that time. But how could I behold something that hasn’t yet happened?’

‘There’s the mystery, of course,’ assented Manners. ‘I can think of only one explanation at all intelligible to our finite minds. This is, that all the events which compose the stream of time have already happened, are happening, and will continue to happen forever. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we perceive with the physical senses merely that moment which we call the present. Under the influence of plutonium, you were able to extend the moment of present cognition in both directions, and to behold simultaneously a portion of that which is normally beyond perception. Thus appeared the vision of yourself as a continuous, immobile body, extending through the time-vista.’

Balcoth, who had been standing, now took his leave. ‘I must be going,’ he said, ‘or I’ll be late for my appointment.’

‘I won’t detain you any longer,’ said Manners. He appeared to hesitate, and then added: ‘I’m still at a loss to comprehend the abrupt cleavage and termination of your prospect of the future. The alley in which it seemed to end was Falman Alley, I suppose — your shortest route to the Belvedere Club. If I were you, Balcoth, I’d take another route, even if it requires a few minutes extra.’

‘That sounds rather sinister,’ laughed Balcoth. ‘Do you think that something may happen to me in Falman Alley?’

‘I hope not — but I can’t guarantee that it won’t.’ Manners’ tone was oddly dry and severe. ‘You’d better do as I suggest.’

Balcoth felt the touch of a momentary shadow as he left the hotel — a premonition brief and light as the passing of some night-bird on noiseless wings. What could it mean -that gulf of infinite blackness into which the weird frieze of his future had appeared to plunge, like a frozen cataract? Was there a menace of some sort that awaited him in a particular place, at a particular moment?

He had a curious feeling of repetition, of doing something that he had done before, as he followed the street. Reaching the entrance of Falman Alley, he took out his watch. By walking briskly and following the alley, he would reach the Belvedere Club punctually. But if he went on around the next block, he would be a little late. Balcoth knew that his prospective patron, Claud Wishhaven, was almost a martinet in denanding punctuality from himself and from others. So he took the alley.

The place appeared to be entirely deserted, as in his vision. Midway, Balcoth approached the half-seen door — a rear entrance of the huge warehouse — which had formed the termination of the time prospect. The door was his last visual impression, for something descended on his head at that moment, and his consciousness was blotted out by the supervening night he had previsioned He had been sand- bagged, very quietly and efficiently, by a twenty-first century thug. The blow was fatal; and time, as far as Balcoth was concerned, had come to an end.

The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut, The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise, By jealous moons maleficently urged To follow me for ever; mountains horned With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued, Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain; And continents of serpent-shapen trees, With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league, Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers, And evil kings, predominanthly armed With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame, Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars, With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought, Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell, With antic gnomes abominably wise, Heave up their icy horns across my way. But naught deters me from the goal ordained By suns and eons and immortal wars, And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ For ending of a brazen book; the goal Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand In amplest heavens multiplied to hold My hordes of thunder-vested avatars, And Promethèan armies of my thought, That brandish claspèd levins. There I call My memories, intolerably clad In light the peaks of paradise may wear, And lead the Armageddon of my dreams Whose instant shout of triumph is become Immensity’s own music: for their feet Are founded on innumerable worlds, Remote in alien epochs, and their arms Upraised, are columns potent to exalt With ease ineffable the countless thrones Of all the gods that are or gods to be, And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set Above the seventh paradise.

Supreme In culminant omniscience manifold, And served by senses multitudinous, Far-posted on the shifting walls of time, With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields Of utter night and chaos, I convoke The Babel of their visions, and attend At once their myriad witness. I behold In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell, With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat, The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list, Too late, the clam of adamantine gongs Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet Have fell the wasp-like sting of little knives Embrued With slobber of the basilisk Or the pail Juice of wounded upas. In Some red Antarean garden-world, I see The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh, And silver-Lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests At moonless eve in terror seek to slay With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood That hide a hueless poison. And I read Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote In gall of slain chimeras; and I know What pentacles the lunar wizards use, That once allured the gulf-returning roc, With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause Midmost an alabaster mount; and there, With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut Uplift by cranes a captive giant built, They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird, And plucked from off his saber-taloned feet Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood, And amethysts from Mars. I lean to read With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star, The monstrous archives of a war that ran Through wasted eons, and the prophecy Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate Some enmity of wivern-headed kings Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury, That bloat within the creators of the moon, And in one still, selenic and fetor; and I know What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, Are proffered to their gods in Uranus By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate, Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor, Took root between the burnished flags, and now Hath mounted and become a hellish tree, Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths, Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne, And strain at starting pillars. I behold The slowly-thronging corals that usurp Some harbour of a million-masted sea, And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold— Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns The octiremes of perished emperors, And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed From a sea-fled haven.

Swifter and stranger grow The visions: now a mighty city looms, Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned In shifting erubescence. But whose hands Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought To semblance of prodigious blooms of old, No eremite hath lingered there to say, And no man comes to learn: for long ago A prophet came, warning its timid king Against the plague of lichens that had crept Across subverted empires, and the sand Of wastes that cyclopean mountains ward; Which, slow and ineluctable, would come To take his fiery bastions and his fanes, And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now I see a host of naked gents, armed With horns of behemoth and unicorn, Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells O hostile wizardry, and stagger on To forests where the very leaves have eyes, And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom; Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs, From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan; Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled To bask upon his azure-spotted spine; Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing, Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then I watch a war of pygmies, met by night, With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide, On plains with no horizon, where a god Might lose his way for centuries; and there, In wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved, A rout of green, enormous moons ascend, With rays that like a shivering venom run On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.

Surveyed From this my throne, as from a central sun, The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass; Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns, Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring Their rays about me like the colored lights Imploring priests might lift to glorify The face of some averted god; the songs Of mystic poets in a purple world Ascend to me in music that is made From unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse Of love ineffable; the lute-players Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon, Call forth delicious languors, never known Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers Of hooded stars inscrutable to God, Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls, lnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies And awful transformations.

If I will I am at once the vision and the seer, And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps, And still abide their suzerain: I am The neophyte who serves a nameless god, Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear, Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds Into the nave where suns might congregate And veils the darkling mountain of his face With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems Opals that are a camel-cumbering load, And monstrous alabraundines, won from war With realms of hostile serpents; which arise, Combustible, in vapors many-hued And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I, The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand The helm of some great barge of orichalchum, Sailing upon an amethystine sea To isles of timeless summer: for the snows Of Hyperborean winter, and their winds, Sleep in his jewel-builded capital, Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry, Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees, With captive kings to urge his serried oars, Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn Hath never left the faintly sighing lote And lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare Impanoplied with azure diamond, As hero of a quest Achernar lights, To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap With tongues intolerably lengthening That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives (Secure as in a garden walled from wind) A lonely flower by a placid well, Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames, That roar as roars a storm-possessed sea, Impacable for ever; and within That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies One drop of an incomparable dew Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings, And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years, And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms, Through courts and colonnades and balconies Wherein immensity itself is mazed, I seek the golden gorget he hath lost, On which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed, Are writ the names of his conniving stars And friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear Like demon tears incessant, through dark ages, The drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once In every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks Innumerably clang with such a sound As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore I find the gorget, but at length I find A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch From that whereon they stretched him; and I find, Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor, The loveliest of all beloved slaves My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side A serpent rises, whiter than the root Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown, And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem Like drops of cold, congealing poison.

Hark! What word was whispered in a tongue unknown, In crypts of some impenetrable world? Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy I cannot share, though I am king of suns, And king therewith of strong eternity, Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads The wind of ether, and the worlds are still To hear the word that flees mine audience. In simultaneous ruin, al my dreams Fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised To semblance by a necromant, and leave Spirit and sense unthinkably alone Above a universe of shrouded stars And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom, Like witches to a Sabbath. . . . Fear is born In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled Reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings To lift it upward like a hellish worm Fain for the flesh of cherubim. Red orbs And eyes that gleam remotely as the stars, But are not eyes of suns or galaxies, Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns, Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom, And make a brief and broken wind that moans As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote, Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time, Or crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark For ages, and my toiling heart-suspends Its clamor as within the clutch of death Tightening with tense, hermetic rigors. Then, In one enormous, million-flashing flame, The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls, And beam to their responding planets; time Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams Rally to that insuperable throne Firmed on the zenith.

Once again I seek The meads of shining moly I had found In some anterior vision, by a stream No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun, A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore Above his golden image. But I find A corpse the ebbing water will not keep, With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell| And felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed By flutes of devils in lascivious dance Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed By sarabands of witches. But I turn To mountains guarding with their horns of snow The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek A pinnacle where none but eagles climb, And they with failing pennons. But in vain I flee, for on that pylon of the sky Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame— Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread, Trying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now I see a silver python far beneath- Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched And forced to flow reverted in its course To mountains whence it issued. Rapidly It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep, And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw Wherein Great Typhon and Enceladus Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone, For at my call a hippogriff hath come, And firm between his thunder-beating wings I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall— Lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek A planet where the outwearied wings of time Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve Above some deathless lily: for therein Beauty hath found an avatar of flowers- Blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole, And turn the skies to perfume. There I find A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset Save by the purple spears of amaranth, And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose, And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets That take the clouds as coronal-these are mine, For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican, And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft To grin a welcome. So I leave awhile My hippogriff to crop the magic meads, And pass into a court the lilies hold, And tread them to a fragrance that pursues To win the portico, whose columns, carved Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms Of bright Aidennic forests-capitalled With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace, Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers Like the dropt lids of women that endure Some loin-dissolving ecstasy. Through doors Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously, I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun, And hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud, A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes Undazzle, and the cloud of color fades, I find me in a monster-guarded room, Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite, Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze, Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound, A crackling smile around that circle runs, And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear That found no name in Babel, flings me on, Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall Within whose weary, self-reverting round, The languid curtains, heavier than palls, Unnumerably depict a weary king Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands In lakes of emerald evening, or the field Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth, And whispers of the innumerable king, Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence Whose very words are vile contagion. Then I reach a room where caryatids, Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women, Surround a throne flowering ebony Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk, Tumid with all the rottenness of kings, Overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold Obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans, And from his fulvous throat a score of tongues, Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers, Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds, And creeping among the flowers of ebony, Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now, Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom, Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs, Ends in golden-roofèd balcony Sphering the flowered horizon.

Ere my heart Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses, I listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim, A mutter faint as when the far simoom, Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth, Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night That shake the doom of cities from their folds, And musters in its van a thousand winds That, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise, And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm, Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears Of them that toil in fields of sesame, So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps Above the gold horizon like a dawn Of darkness climbing zenith-ward. They come, The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing, And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice, Chimera, martichoras, behemoth, Geryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken Arise as might some Afrit-builded city Consummate in the lifting of a lash With thunderous domes and sounding obelisks And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons— Born from the caverns of a dying sun Uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed From gulfs below the horizon; octopi Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire, Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame That roll and roar through planets unconsumed, Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts That range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise, Afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns Amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras, The shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom; And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned On-sable dragons, and the cockodrills That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs; And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph, On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies That move with fronts reverted from the foe, And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes The shields reflect in crystal; and eidola Fashioned within unfathomable caves By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind Worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world, With krakens from the ultimate abyss, And Demogorgons of the outer dark, Arising, shout with dire multisonous clamors, And threatening me with dooms ineffable In words whereat the heavens leap to flame, Advance upon the enchanted palace. Falling For league on league before, their shadows light And eat like fire the arnaranthine meads, Leaving an ashen desert. In the palace I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl, And all the women-shapen columns moan, Babbling with terror. In my tenfold fear, A monstrous dread unnamed in any hall, I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings, And in a trice the wizard palace reefs, And spring to a single tower of flame, Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind I reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge, Where fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall, Supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom, Beyond the scope and vision of the sun, To other skies and systems.

In a world Deep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi That soar to semblance of fantastic palms, I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break A score of trunks to atom powder. Unharmed I rise, and through the illimitable woods, Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam, And see their tops that clamber hour by hour To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen, Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air With spreading pools of fetor, follow me, Elusive past the ever-changing palms; And pittering moths with wide and ashen wings Flit on before, and insects ember-hued, Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard Far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown Resounds at measured intervals of time, Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me Beneath an irised pall.

Now the palmettoes Grow far apart, and lessen momently To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them I see an empty desert, all ablaze With ametrysts and rubies, and the dust Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam, Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me With leaping waves of endless rutilance, Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom Through which I wander blind as any Kobold; Till underfoot the grinding sands give place To stone or metal, with a massive ring More welcome to mine ears than golden bells Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge Of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches, Level as windless water, to the verge Of all the world; and through the sable plain A hundred streams of shattered marble run, And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze, Like to the ruin of all the wars of time, To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts Adown the gulfs eternal.

So I follow Between a river of steel and a river of bronze, With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice From which they fall, and make the mighty sound Of a million swords that meet a million shields, Or din of spears and armour in the wars Of half the worlds and eons. Far beneath They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void, And vanish like a stream of broken stars into the nether darkness; nor the gods Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf, Will dare to know what everlasting sea Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore In one unebbing tide.

What nimbus-cloud Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse, Is on the suns opal? At my side The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam Through darkness falling as the night that falls From spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold Betwixt the sable desert and the suns, The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout, Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds, Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs, And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged After the ravin of dispeopled lands, And harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell, Hot from abominable feasts, and fain To cool their beaks and talons in my blood— All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear, With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms, Makes horrent now the horizon. From the wan I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill As tempests in a broken fane, and roar Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind Falls from them like the wind before the storm, And in the wind my riven garment streams And flutters in the face of all the void, Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost On the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze— Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings Inseparable mingled. Scarce I keep My footing in the gulfward winds of fear, And mighty thunders beating to the void In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee With them, and prove the nadir-founded night Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom To measure with my gaze the dread descent, I see a tiny star within the depths- A light that stays me while the wings of doom Convene their thickening thousands: for the star increases, taking to its hueless orb, With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams, The light as of a million million moons; And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face That fills the void and fills the universe, And bloats against the limits of the world With lips of flame that open . . .

The post PseudoPod 591: The Plutonian Drug and The Hashish-Eater appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Evan Marcroft
• Narrator : Kris Straub
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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PseudoPod 590: Emperor All is a PseudoPod original.

Emperor All By Evan Marcroft

It is like X-ray vision. Like in the comic books from when he was ten. John blinks the rain out of his eyes, and suddenly he can see through the mugger, through his shellacking of wet muscle and scaffolding of bone to the chassis beneath, to the gears and flywheels that make him move and point the knife at him. John reaches through a yielding mist of sinew and makes key refurbishments, so that the knife is aimed at the mugger’s own throat. He unscrews the man’s skull and with an easy tinkering makes him the saddest he’s ever been, plugs bright blaring red thoughts into his head.

A moment later he steps over the body and splashes across the parking lot, trembling giddily. He can’t remember where he left his car, and the city is dark. Instead he auditions the cars lined up on either side of him until he finds one that is better than his own, and makes it his.

It is unlocked when he tries the handle, and when it snarls to life (with just his touch) his favorite song is playing on the radio. The traffic lights are all green on the drive home. The police are all at other crimes as the speedometer needle roars past sixty.

That night John makes love to his wife Naomi with a ferocity he didn’t have before. She claws his back and coos that he is the best any woman could ever have. She has never said anything like that before. He can’t tell her yet what has changed. Any phrasing sounds insane. That night, John dreams dreams of concrete, wires, and riveted steel.

The next morning John awakes, his mind boiling with ideas.

Hair combed, tie straight, fortified with coffee, he walks into the office and sits in the company president’s big black leather chair, and when the president comes in John tells him that he is fired and grins as the fat fuck begs for his miserable job before sending him away in tears. For a long ten minutes he sits at his mile-long desk, drumming his fingers, before realizing that he is thinking small, and leaves in his new convertible, formerly the president’s.

Back at home he turns on the television and stares at the news until suddenly the pretty blonde newspuppet is excitedly announcing that this just in the winner of the city lottery is him, with the numbers one two three four on a ticket he never bought. He can feel first-hand the truth swimming against time and causality, salmon-like, tweaking the screws of the universe to fit him more snugly. All the proper official lottery people abruptly agree with the news lady, and always had agreed, and are scrambling to come right now with a giant movie cheque. Now he has all the money he’ll ever need forever.

John reclines in his chair to bask in the comfort of infinite wealth. But, still, that itching discontent. Same problem. Same spot itched. Then he thinks of the vehicle parked in his driveway, worth more than this house, how some clerk somewhere is now putting his name on its registration without really knowing why, and understands: He is in control now. What does he need money for? Dollars are how you ask for things.

You don’t ask for what is already yours.

After a week of experimentation, John concludes that he isn’t a god.

There are boundaries to what he can do. The principle one is distance. John discovers quickly that everything outside city limits is beyond him. He becomes people on the highway leading out, to see how far his dominion extends, and counts the miles it takes them to go dark.

Neither can he make miracles, in the biblical definition. He can’t wish diamonds into his pockets in a puff of pixie dust. His impulses actualize only as quickly as the city’s millions can manage. He can pile coincidences together like bricks and stress probability, but unless he pushes very hard, his inquisitive, innocent little wishes must still come true within the logic of the city, slowed by bureaucracy and faulty infrastructure and simple human error.

Yet John is not as disappointed by all of this as he thought he would be. The city feels enough for him. More than he thought he’d get, certainly. And tripping over the coffee table one morning, he is relieved to know he can still bleed.

John is doing anything he ever wanted to do.

He wins tickets to every concert that tours through. He is the guest at every movie premier, sitting right up front between the tuxedo’d stars. He has that pretty barista at the Starbucks by his old office give him head behind the counter just like he’s always fantasized, but thinks of Naomi afterwards, and doesn’t have her do any more.

Feeling guilty, he drives Naomi up to the hills and parks her in a mansion overlooking his city, one with a shiny new butler waiting to be switched on and more pool than they know what to do with. He fills every room with the latest everything. Every day she wonders, agog, how all of this could happen, and with a laugh, John flicks the question from her head like a gob of lint. Bewildered, but happy, she lives on his arm.

There is something he has been keeping to his chest, a dinner at the most glamorous restaurant in the city. There, with gemstones winking in her ears, smiling brightly across her neck, she tells him that she loves him. And for the first time, John knows absolutely that it is true.

As weeks evolve into months, and John wears a groove in his throne, he begins to question.

Why? How?

He spends more and more of his infinite time exploring the city that is inexplicably his, in ways only he can. Video games and automobiles have slowly lost their shine. They are things anyone can enjoy. Only he is privy to reality of reality, to the architecture fundamental to the architecture. He knows now what forces draw pigeons to shit on statues. He can see the conveyer belts that all men and women are born onto, how every step of their lives is denoted on a blueprint of galactic complexity. It is all very mathematic. Very designed. Down to the dust that crusts on a car’s windshield, everything is, under the skin, a gear biting into a quintillion more gears, a subatomic speck of one great machine.

When John wants for something, he spins the right gear and the whole city revolves–clanging, swearing, hissing smoke--in kind to bring his wish to him. Each towering postmodern tooth of the skyline is a puzzle of pistons and quarkical cogwheels, and John knows what each of them does.

So what is he then? A god, like he used to think? Is this heaven? Has he somehow tumbled off his own set of tracks and seen that the scenery is painted plywood, to be shuffled about as he deems best? Is he something that no words fit?

Anything is possible, John is learning. He has found many impossible things in the city already. There is space folded under space by some nuance of physics as of yet unnamed. There are strange creatures living strange lives just below the human spectrum of perceptions. They scavenge on lost time and confusion, and each other. In the city’s dank cracks John uncovers cultures alien to anything on Earth, of men and not-exactly-men. He observes them perform what he is tempted to call magic, but can’t quite.

They are aware of him, too, in a small way; some run from his panopticon’s gaze, or hide in futility. Others worship him through obscene displays of liturgy. They make him wonder if he has inherited these powers, this city, or if he has been elected into them through some unknowably cyphered vote.

Perhaps before his reign there was another city-king, now dead. Indeed, sometimes he detects in the scaffolding of his demesne hints of artifice–lingering echoes of craftsmanship not his own. But these hypotheses only beget more unanswerable questions, ones that John does not like to dwell on for long.

John leaves the strange things be. He doesn’t care to understand them. If he was not cognizant of them before, he needn’t be now. And they are still only more subjects.

Every now and then John attempts–always in vain–to expand the borders of his city. But, inevitably, these sudden public works projects all collapse for various contrived reasons outside of his influence. Perhaps with sustained effort, he thinks, but can’t commit to finding out how long that would take. Or perhaps he isn’t as strong as he will be, in time. This last notion satisfies him. He sleeps with a contented smile, certain that there will be no end of things to do.

But sometimes it niggles at him, that chance that there were others like him–or that there still are. A king for every city, with power where he has none.

Is that why he can’t move outwards?

Is someone keeping him in?

John has only sparingly left the city, and his desire to do so shrivels almost overnight. He busies himself with sex and games. When Naomi pesters him to take a vacation somewhere balmy, or wintry if he likes, he snatches the idea from her and throws it away. She screams for days without knowing why, until John takes pity and makes her sunny again, the way he likes her.

A whole year is behind him. John is eating at the most glamorous restaurant in the city, alone. This is the fifth time this month, and he has grown sick of it. But he has hit an extravagance ceiling, and has no other choice. Everywhere else is beneath him. The mirror of his wine glass reminds him that he has grown paunchy. His jowls rankle him. Yet he can never summon the verve to exercise anymore. The only thing swimming in his pool is frogs. There is nothing he needs done that he must do himself. His wife doesn’t care what he looks like.

And neither do the other women, for that matter. Out of ennui he has taken to crawling into random beds and making a wife of whatever females he finds there for a night or two. He rationalizes this by remodeling them into a second Naomi for as long as he is inside them, but his guilt has all but run dry. He still feels affection for her, certainly, and continues to lavish her with her heart’s daily desires, but feels the need for her company less and less.

She is becoming yet another used-up luxury item gathering dust in his house, and it has proven beyond his omnipotence to make her interesting.

John puts his fork down, and washes his throat with wine. This last bite was the last he can stand. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll have the place burned down, in the hope that he’ll want it again by the time it’s rebuilt.

But as John stands and makes to leave, something unprecedented happens: he is stopped. There is a waiter suddenly in his way, requesting politely but firmly that he pay his bill. John irritably makes himself the restaurant’s owner, effective as of ten minutes ago, with the effort it takes to scratch an itch, but still the man refuses to budge. You are not the owner of this establishment he retorts, affronted, flying in the face of fact. A respected patron, but not the owner.

John’s voice is hoarse from disuse. He has little incentive to speak these days, save to Naomi, at their dwindling meals together. Everyone else is just another arm.

“Then who is?”

In reply the waiter glances discreetly past his shoulder; John turns to follow his gaze.

The far end of the restaurant is swamped in a fug of cigar smoke. The lights are turned down low, for the ambiance. He can’t quite discern the face of the man who sits by himself near the kitchen door–the man, the lean man in an acute-angled suit, who ever so subtly nods in acknowledgement, and tips a snifter of something to his lips.

There is an ice-toed centipede on John’s neck. He does not think, but simply explodes at the man, meaning to drown him in the immensity of his disembodied self. But his tentacles snap shut around nothing. If John weren’t seeing him, he would swear there was nobody there at all.

John leaves stiff-leggedly, shouldering past the waiter who has gone plastic as a mannequin, already steering his chauffeur to the curb to pick him up. He riffles through every soul in a mile radius, just to know that he still can. They are there, and for a moment he is relieved, but there is nothing inside of them to take hold of and puppeteer, no cracks to worm inside of. They are all solid stone, and there is nothing he can do about it. They belong to someone else.

Inside the warmth of his limousine, John falls on to his side and hugs his knees to his chest.

He is no longer in control.

Everything he feared has come to pass.

John has a rival.

There is no other option.

It is already war.

John does not waste time speculating how this other man may have come to be. Whether he has come from another city to seize this one for his own, or some cosmic misfire spawned two city-gods instead of one, it doesn’t matter. His existence is an open sore, intolerable; there cannot be two of him.

The first order of business is to reconfigure his house into a fortress capable of withstanding whatever the other man throw against him. He requisitions citizens from their occupations to his estate in snaking lines of ants, arming them from the gun stores and personal stockpiles he empties. He concentrates until his windows are barred and bulletproof and there is a panic room of dense steel in his cellar. The neighbors are either evicted or given a psychological reshingling to make them better soldiers.

Once this is done, he gathers himself into an anvilhead and sweeps down the hills into the city like a pyroclastic avalanche, seeding his will in every soul caught in his swathe. They become his eyes and ears, whole boroughs of unknowing spies. It was a cowardly mistake to flee from his rival at the restaurant. He should have laid him low him while he had the chance, with his own hands if he had to. He is out of sight now–a snake in the grass. Infinitely more dangerous.

But although he knows this, for all his preparation, John is unprepared. A runaway truck T-bones a parked cop car, killing two of his agents. A sudden fever of arson immolates a score of them. More are gunned down in a workplace shooting. John experiences each death as a maiming. The pain, the shame of weakness, sharpens his mind.

He learns quickly to identify by feel those that his enemy has seized; they are detritus stuck in the gears of his city, impairing the manufacture of his design. His foe must have been subtly amassing them from those blind-spots where John did not bother to exert control directly, never acting contrary to his will until the time was right to strike. John curses himself for not noticing them sooner. His complacency could very well have killed him.

He bides his time, sacrificing a handful of limbs to elaborate the illusion of weakness, sneaking pieces into position, before striking back. A car dealership is pipe-bombed. A homeless man sets fire to a supermarket. The idea is denial of resources. His foe’s agents need to eat.

John applauds himself for this strategy. Taking the long view, it will be far more effective than taking pot shots at his enemy in the street. He will whittle his forces down to stubs, smoke the man from whatever hole he cowers in, and crush him under heel like he would a rat.

Then one morning he awakes to the staccato of approaching gunfire. There is slaughter in the sloping streets. As The Enemy hacks fingers and digs eyes from his body John sees his error in bleak clarity. In fortifying his home as thoroughly as he did, John has made himself a landmark. The Enemy has been playing him all along, allowing him an edge in the war so that he will forget there is no war if John is dead.

He escapes the smoldering skeleton of his house with singed hair, a hysterical wife, and a rancid hate in his throat.

John is in hiding. Wounded but alive, and stronger than before. For every time The Enemy fails to kill him he learns a lesson.

The city is everywhere a battleground. Nowhere is safe. Skyscrapers have become barracks where unknowing soldiers wait to be sent out to die in the no-man’s-lands that are the streets in between. Every pedestrian is a potential assassin, and spontaneous massacres break out like acne across the city’s face. The public sees this all as an inexplicable crime wave, ignorant of their new purpose. Both sides vie for hospitals and other logistic necessities. What they cannot take, they destroy. What they lose, they destroy. It is better to let one’s field’s burn than let The Enemy have one bite from them.

The strange things of the city have been enlisted, and fight underground skirmishes of a kind that would drive men mad at witnessing. When John runs low on weaponry he begins to import guns from outside the city, and so his enemy moves to intercept them, and it is not long before the city is valved off from the world by the battles of attrition consuming its roads and highways. John knows that with no supplies coming into the city the war must end soon. When there are no more bullets, no more working cars to kamikaze, one side will have to give.

As their fluid armies wage their guerilla warfare, as schools are shot up week after week and police stations are bombed to lawful dust, so too do John and his nemesis take the their fight subcutaneous, down into the city’ staging. John gets into the city’s teeming universe of bacteria to make The Enemy’s food supply rot that much quicker. It is not enough, and so he goes deeper, prying and teasing and massaging physics to see what complies. He finds a way to make electricity itself more volatile, and from then on the city’s lights flicker tempestuously.

He can sense his enemy’s uncertainty in the stratagems that ensue. He knows that he has irreversibly changed the rules of the game. And as the city deteriorates, as their legions thin, John is certain the end is near.

In the end it did not take long for his enemy, under the duress of the war, to break into the same enlightenment that John discovered. In what he must assume to be years The Enemy has wrought terrible changes in the city. The air is thinner these days. John never deduced what The Enemy had done to cause that, but he can only dimly remember a tree that wasn’t strangled bare. And there are no seasons anymore, just a pervading gray between the horizons, as though the city has been concreted off. Time has broken free of the minute and hour hands; night is but a blushing of the sunless sky, and comes in stuttering fits.

All public facilities have long since broken down, as the men and women who could maintain them were called away to fight and die. There is water when it rains, and that is not often. There are no police, and no law to need them. With no doctors left and no hospitals still standing, disease wastes almost as much of John’s forces as The Enemy does, although the inverse is also true. They have long ago extinguished electricity altogether, to deny the advantage of it to each other. No-one is making clothes, and so both armies are nude. There are no more guns, so they fight with knives and bones and jags of ruin. They make stinking tent camps among the mossy ruins of the skyscrapers that once pushed the city’s borders towards the sky.

The war is a saw-blade of victories and tragedies. One disastrous misstep leaves John’s citizen-militia perilously thin, and so he breeds his populace together frenziedly to replace them while an elite force holds the front lines. No-one but they are exempt. For months his streets are cacophonic with ecstatic moans. In an eye-blink of ten-some years his forces are restored to full might. The weak, disabled, and dead are recycled to fuel those remaining, for the sake of efficiency. So it goes.

John checks on his wife from time to time. She has grown frail trapped in their secret palace underground. All of the friends John gave her over the years have been conscripted to the war effort for want of real soldiers. The plastic surgeries that keep her looking twenty, then thirty, forty, when John still had time to mate with her, are unraveling. She has read all the books in the palace until they fell apart, and watched all the movies until the power went out for good. For a while he had music played for her, but there are no more musicians. So mostly Naomi sleeps, and combs her thin, white hair, and polishes the worthless little baubles in her room, and screams at the walls, and organizes her closet over and over and over again. John is satisfied with this state of being. She is both safe and comfortable.

Except, now she is doing none of those things she always does. Now, it seems, she has packed a suitcase and is dragging it down many flights of candle-lit stairs to the chamber from where John directs the war. She is gulping air by the time she appears at the door-less aperture of his war room.

John does not stir at her arrival. He has not felt the need to move at all in some time. Others bring him food and water, and take his shit away in pails. He glimpses the state of himself through her, feels her swallow her terror at how his body has evolved to accommodate his unbound will. His finger and toenails, the color of scab, have grown into the bare floor, and worm ever more thickly through it like roots. His neck has sprouted into a veiny trunk from which the unraveled threads of his head in turn branch into a fleshy canopy. Twigs of spiraled cartilage and brain blur into invisibility where they interface with the hardware of reality. His eyes dangle on withered stems.

John hears her sanity creak beneath the weight of him. It is a shame she cannot appreciate the beauty of it. He is becoming design and designer both, a sublime, monadic will. Soon he will have no body but the city.

“John,” she says. “I’m done, John. I’m leaving.”

But she is not. She has threatened this before, but she knows that it is impossible. There is no way out of the city.

“John, please. Let me go. I don’t care anymore.”

She must be patient. They have come this far already, and lost so much. Victory is nigh, and no matter how broken the city is, it can be fixed. No matter the millions dead, they can be bred back to life, stronger than ever before. He is breaking all the old rules. He is between the atoms of the city now, and there he knows that here he will find a way to kill The Enemy once and finally. The machine can be repaired, and the wish that it will make real for them is for everything to be as it was.

“John, please. Listen to yourself. Do you even know what you’re saying? Do you… do you even know you’re talking?”

There are dark masses upon the distances that grow larger with every passing day. The other cities are coming. They are finally coming, as he always knew they would, skittering ravenously across the country on legs of annexation and urban renovation, leaving snail-trails of temporary causeway in their wakes. They see him weak, and think this is their moment to pounce and devour him. And maybe he is weak, but an animal is most dangerous when it has nowhere to run. Fine. Let them come. When they dig their teeth into him he will breach like a dying whale and crush them beneath him. He will become all they are, and from the rubble, from bloody silt, from radioactive smoke, will rise something greater than his city, greater than any city.

Tears drip through the wrinkles in his wife’s face. “Please John. I don’t care about any of that. I’m begging you. It hurts, John. Let me go. Please. Please. Please.”

John is growing distracted, so he tears away her capacity to worry any longer and devours it. He hears, faintly, an unvoiced scream petering off into the bleeding emptiness in her mind. A pity that she still could not understand. Great things are founded upon hardship and sacrifice. Happiness must be fought for, tooth and nail, bled for until you’re brittle-dry. What empire ever stood on peace? This is how I build my Rome, my love. This is how I build my Xanadu. We have walked our forty years, you and I. Give me one more day.

I will make it all sunny again. Just the way you like it.

The post PseudoPod 590: Emperor All appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Jack London, Melissa Snark and Sam Gorenstein
• Narrators : B.J. Harrison, Tad Callin and Kaz
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

A Bar Story originally appeared on The Snarkology during the October 2014 Halloween Hop. It has since been reposted to Melissa’s author website as a free read. 

Moon Face was first published in The Argonaut, July 21, 1902

Edgar is a PseudoPod Original.

People are strange when you’re a stranger Faces look ugly when you’re alone

Sam Gorenstein: “I’d like to dedicate ‘Edgar’ to my late uncle Conan Gorenstein, who passed away in 2013.”

A Bar Story by Melissa Snark

The gangly youth scurried on long legs and over-sized feet. He stumbled on a cracked tile, but righted himself. Shoulders squared, Daniel Hollar ran a hand through his long orange hair, finger combing the frizzy mess. Hundreds of freckles peppered his pale face, and his green eyes were bright behind wire-rimmed glasses.

He slapped on a polite smile for the middle-aged man crouched on a stool at the end of the L-shaped bar. The customer’s arms rested on the counter, the diamond frame forming a protective barrier about the shot glass cradled between his hands. Sweat bullets lined the customer’s blotchy red forehead. A scraggly crown of damp hair stuck to the collar of his white dress shirt. His gut overhung belted dark trousers. He wore a clean gold band on his left ring finger and his clothing was made from fine fabric.

“Evenin’, sir. What’s your poison?”

The customer’s lips bowed in a fearsome grin, revealing yellowed teeth. A hint of jaundice touched the sclera of his eyes. “Belladonna,” he said softly. “Oh deadly nightshade, beautiful woman.”

“Wha– Sorry?” Daniel dipped his head, trying to make out the man’s words, and got a good whiff. A malignant scent circled the man like a coiled serpent, the combined cologne of booze, cigarettes, and body odor. Gagging, he jerked back and turned his head to the side.

The man lifted his shot glass in toast. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Daniel’s eyes bulged. What a total nut! Biting his lower lip, he spoke at a pace suited to fools and madmen. “I’m sorry? Would you like something to drink?”

“Jack.”

“Daniel. Pleased to meet you.” He stuck forward his hand, held straight out and rigid.

Wicked humor lit the man’s gray eyes. He refused the proffered hand. “Jack Daniels. Neat. Leave the bottle.”

“Oh.” Cheeks burning, Daniel fumbled through the bottles of booze on the back wall until he located the correct bottle. He poured the man’s drink, sloshing amber liquid over the rim of the shot glass.

The customer dug into his pocket, extracted his wallet, and deposited a hundred dollar bill on the bar.

“You want change?”

“Nah, just put it toward my tab.”

“Yes, sir.”

Daniel retreated to stand beside his boss. Patrick Whalen, a grizzled Irishman and owner of the Albatross Tavern, was known as Twitch by the hardened sea-faring locals who frequented the Portsmouth, Maine wharf side bar.

The youth shoved his hands into the pocket of his navy windbreaker, striving to appear nonchalant. He tipped his head toward the customer. “Odd duck, that one.”

Twitch’s round head rolled on the long stalk of his neck toward the end of the bar. The old man’s eyelid pulled in a constant facial tic–wink wink wink. His stretched taut in a sardonic smile. “Arrogant bastard, ain’t he, Danny me boy? But he pays his tab ‘n comes in regular, so I ain’t got no problems with ’em.”

Doing his best to appear disinterested, Daniel picked up a white rag and wiped down the scratched oaken bar counter. He cast a surreptitious glance down the length of the bar. “Who is he?”

“That?” Twitch tilted his head. “That’s Jack. Jack Thorn. He’s a local author. Horror fic, like that King fellow.”

“Is he famous?”

“Meybe. Yer an English major, ain’tcha?”

“Yeah, but I’ve never heard of ’em.”

The old man sniggered and picked up the ice bucket, limping toward the machine. “His stories got less cursin’, so I reckon that makes him more of a literary figure.”

Too curious to resist temptation, the young man trailed Twitch, hoping to glean more information.

“Are his books movies?”

Twitch shot Daniel a long look as if considering a moron. He sneered. “Course not.  His books are books. Movies is movies. The one ain’t got nuthin’ to do with the other. Everyone with a lick o’ sense knows that.”

Wink wink wink…

Danny hung his head. “Sorry.”

Twitch slapped him on the back, knocking him off his feet. “Don’t worry your wee head ’bout it. Ain’t your fault that you’re greener than the titties on a leprechaun.”

The boy’s face lit like wildfire, drawing another cackle from the old man. Cursing the pale complexion that went with his ginger hair, Daniel tried and failed to keep his speculative gaze averted from Jack Thorn.

The author sat twisted on his stool, engaged in an animated conversation with the empty seat beside him. There was no one else at the bar in either direction.

Twitch filled the ice bucket to the brim, and thrust the container into the boy’s hands. “Here, go dump this in the bin. My leg is achin’ somethin’ fierce.”

Obediently, the young man trotted to the ice machine. He emptied the bucket, and returned to fill it again. “Who’s he talking to?”

“That one’s crazy as a loon.” Leaning forward, Twitch tapped his temple and spoke in a hushed voice. “Talks to himself ‘n lives all alone in a big house out on the promontory.”

Jack Thorn’s disquieting gray eyes pinned him. A chill tore through Daniel’s soul. Hastily, he averted his gaze. He swallowed convulsively, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I’ve seen it.”

The old man’s thin lips stretched to reveal cracked, yellow teeth.

Wink wink wink…

“Jack over there used to have a wife and daughter. Wife was a real beauty and the little girl was an angel. Four years old with blonde pigtails and big blue eyes…”

Danny shivered. He dropped the scoop back into the ice machine and closed the flap. “What happened to them?”

“They ain’t been seen for years. Some says they left ’em, others that he killed ’em. There was a police investigation, but no bodies ever been found. No one knows.”

Danny leaned in close so the old man’s sour breath scoured his nostrils. “What do you think happened?”

Twitch’s predatory smile swelled. He threw up clawed hands and shouted, “He ate ’em!”

Heart slamming against his breast, Daniel leapt backward. He dropped the bucket and ice cubes scattered across the floor. His foot slipped on wetness and his knees locked. He slammed his elbow against the counter. Sharp pain lanced through his entire arm.

Twitch roared with laughter.

Humiliation stung Daniel’s pride worse than his injured elbow. A cold sweat broke out across his body. Staggering, he retreated toward the bathroom, heading toward the smirking author.

Jack Thorn grabbed the boy’s arm as he stumbled past. That ghoulish face, leered at him. “They tasted real good!”

Moon-Face A Story of Mortal Antipathy By Jack London

John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: “I do not like that man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself–before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! ha!” and “Ho! ho!” rose up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.

I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor, dumb beasties are not to be blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”

He had a dog he called “Mars,” a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day, when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face as much like the full moon as it always had been.

Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.

“Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on trout.”

Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested, no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for existing. But no. he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.

I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

“I fight you? Why?” he asked slowly. And then he laughed. “You are so funny! Ho! ho! You’ll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!

What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I hated him! Then there was that name–Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown, or Jones–but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to yourself–Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of it–Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask of you. “No,” you say. And “No” said I.

But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd, close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face till it was as a full-risen moon.

“Ha! ha! ha!” he laughed. “The funniest tike, that youngster of mine! Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. ‘O papa!’ he cried; ‘a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.'”

He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

“I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went sour.

He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light, glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh–“Ha! ha! That’s funny! You don’t see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn’t see it! Why, look here. You know a puddle–”

But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.

Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man with one’s naked fist–faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed against me.

To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked that this training consisted entirely of one thing–RETRIEVING. I taught the dog, which I called “Bellona,” to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught me. She was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness that I was soon content.

After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he was regularly and inveterately guilty.

“No,” he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. “No, you don’t mean it.” And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his damnable moon-face.

“I–I kind of thought, somehow, you didn’t like me,” he explained. “Wasn’t it funny for me to make such a mistake?” And at the thought he held his sides with laughter.

“What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.

“Bellona,” I said.

“He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”

I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”

Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he exploded with: “That was my other dog. Well, I guess she’s a widow now. Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!” he whooped after me, and I turned and fled swiftly over the hill.

The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away Monday, don’t you?”

He nodded his head and grinned.

“Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just ‘dote’ on.”

But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.”

Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging myself with rapture.

Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my pipe.

Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes. Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to be a stick of “giant”; for such was his method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the “giant” tightly in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive into the pool.

Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the stick of “giant” in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger, and started to run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big hole in the ground.

“Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing.” That was the verdict of the coroner’s jury; and that is why I pride myself on the neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night’s sleep deep.

Edgar By Samuel Joseph Gorenstein

I.

Edgar would like to not go to the zoo. He would like to not marvel at the giraffes, nor the toucans, nor the goats. Edgar would like his nephew to pick a different place. He makes this clear. His nephew offers a counterpoint in the form of banging his light-up fire truck against the wooden leg of the living room table. Edgar would like to not have people crack his furniture with their playthings. He makes this clear as well. His nephew, Stanley, offers a counterpoint by continuing to bang his light-up fire truck against the wooden leg of the living room table. Edgar will go to the zoo.

He is a good babysitter, Edgar. His sister will see this. He did not lose Stanley’s older brother Charlie at a carnival three years ago. Even if he had, he also found his nephew’s older brother Charlie at that same carnival not long after. Rather, the police found him. Someone found him, and it’s the finding that was truly important.

“Because we’re all lost in our own unique ways,” Edgar had said. “All searching, all elbowing to find our way through, and isn’t it more worth celebrating the relief of any of those losses than in lamenting their addition?”

Edgar’s sister offered a counterpoint in the form of not speaking with him for two and a half years.

They hurry by the jaguar cage, the reptile garden, the aquarium. Edgar holds his nephew on his shoulders and they watch the penguins contemplate their captivity.

II.

The Ukrainian Tea bird is a violent, non-flying creature with a plume of tail feathers that curl back towards its head like a handle. If the lighting is proper, its coloring and sheen are close to that of expired cough syrup. It screeches with ceaseless terror at anything larger than a pigeon approaching its cage. Edgar’s nephew will not leave it alone.

“I want it to bite me,” his nephew says, pounding on the plastic.

Some people stare, though most don’t, and the ones that do are gone before Edgar can decide if he should offer an excuse. There are other things to look at, of course. Edgar suggests they go look at one of those other things. He tugs at a corduroy strap on Stanley’s overalls, but Stanley pulls away from him with a little shout and continues to pound.

There are no holes large enough for the bird to fit its beak through. Edgar tells his nephew this. There are holes large enough for Edgar’s nephew to fit his fingers through, as they both find out. Edgar yanks him back from the cage. Stanley is bleeding.

III.

The first-aid station is closed until four. Edgar presses a paper towel to his nephew’s index finger as they sit on a bench nearby. Stanley refuses to do so himself, beaming, attempting to show his wound to other visitors.

“I got bit,” he shouts. “It bit me!”

Edgar agrees that he is not responsible for the cut. He did not pull his nephew away too quickly. The edges of those air holes were not sharp enough to break skin. There are specifications to which factories build cages, safety regulations to predict misuse. He couldn’t have stopped his nephew from reaching in, strong-willed as children often are, but he took every correct step as a result. He caused no harm. He is still a good babysitter. He lifts the paper towel to check again.

Still bleeding, but definitely a bite. No doubt. He looks closely to see if the blood is congealing. It truly is a bite, he realizes. Yes, definitely not his fault. Although, if he is remembering properly, the bird had been cowering on the other side of the cage at the time.

IV.

There’s another bite on the ride home. Edgar doesn’t notice it until they’re a mile and a half from the zoo. He is only checking the rear view mirror to make sure his nephew doesn’t pick at the single adhesive bandage Edgar was able to unearth from his glove compartment. The aid station had not reopened at four.

His nephew hunches down, out of view of the mirror, no doubt hiding his actions, no doubt playing games with uncle Edgar. Edgar is certain of this. He cranes upward, his nephew pulling down further. The car’s ceiling prevents Edgar from angling up any more. He considers re-adjusting the mirror, but that would be too obvious, too close to admitting he doesn’t know what his nephew is doing. A good uncle knows without needing to check.

As does a good uncle pay attention to the road, he realizes, veering back into the correct lane. He looks at the mirror. His nephew is sitting straight again, face blank. The bandage appears untouched. Edgar concedes to his inevitable defeat and adjusts the mirror. His nephew’s right leg is bleeding near the ankle, bleeding quickly. He pulls over in a fast food parking lot and unbuckles to examine it more carefully. It’s another bite, two rigid cuts symmetrically plucked into his nephew’s skin, deep cuts.

“What happened?” asks Edgar.

“I got bit,” says his nephew.

“By what?”

His nephew stares at the car door and says nothing.

V.

They ask Edgar if he saw his nephew trying to harm himself.

“No,” says Edgar.

They ask Edgar if he’s tried to harm his nephew.

“No,” says Edgar.

They do not believe him. They will have to call the boy’s mother.

“Fine,” he says.

He sits in the hospital waiting room as Stanley gets stitches. The cuts were even deeper than Edgar had thought, a few millimeters from the bone. Edgar had wondered if something in the back seat had scraped up against his nephew, but Edgar’s car was clean. There was nothing back there, certainly nothing that could draw blood.

Edgar stacks the gardening magazines on the table next to him by color, then by relative size, looking for any variation around the perimeters of different issues of the same publication. Then he unstacks them, and places them with their cousins in a varnished magazine rack on the wall. He rescues a peanut butter candy bar from a brown, twist-knob vending machine. He leaves it in the tray on the bottom. He sits back down.

“Hello Uncle Edgar,” says Charlie.

“Hello Charlie,” says Edgar.

Charlie is taller now, up to his mother’s shoulders. His hair a little brighter. His voice is a little louder, a little easier to follow. Edgar’s sister says nothing. She has the doctors take her in immediately. She almost forgets Charlie and leaves him with Edgar, but comes back to pull her elder son along. Edgar is alone again. He gets up and checks to see if the candy bar is still in the tray of the vending machine. It isn’t. He sits back down.

Edgar realizes the man behind the check-in desk is staring at him, has been staring at him. Edgar looks away and moves to another chair. He looks back at the desk. The man is still staring, muttering something. This was the man who checked Edgar in, when Edgar had carried Stanley from the car, when Edgar could not stop the bleeding.

Edgar is not responsible. The man must be made to know this, he must understand this. The man does not need to look at Edgar as if Edgar is a disgusting thorn on a human thicket. Edgar gets up and goes to the man.

“I am not responsible,” he says.

The man understands now. He continues to stare at Edgar, who takes the magazines back out from the rack and sits back down.

VI.

There are four bites now, Charlie tells him: one on the other leg, another on the elbow. Four bites and Edgar wasn’t around for two of them. The doctors saw them form, so it can’t be his fault. Unless, as the doctors now believe, it’s an infection, or a contagion and the bites aren’t bites but lesions. Edgar’s nephew is quarantined, and Edgar won’t be allowed to leave until they’re sure he’s not spreading it. His sister still says nothing to him. No, she says two things:

“What did you give him?”

“I didn’t give him anything,” says Edgar.

“What did he touch?”

“He touched everything,” says Edgar.

It’s not just Edgar they keep from leaving, though they keep him the longest. By the end of the night there’s five bites, by morning eight. There’s fourteen at the end of the week, but nothing on Edgar, nothing on Charlie, or Edgar’s sister, or any of the other patients or doctors or visitors. They let him go, let him visit his younger nephew, though they still don’t let him get close.

His nephew is not crying, not upset, though much less excited than Edgar last saw him. They’ve hooked him to an I.V. and a television remote. The marks are clear: On his chin, on his stomach, on his arms, his hands, his shoulders. But they’re too uniform, too deliberate. He’s not bleeding anymore. They can stop that fast enough for now.

“It’s still biting me,” he says.

“Where is it?” asks Edgar. “Is it following you?”

Edgar’s nephew closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“It’s biting me from where I found it.”

“Can you get it to stop?” asks Edgar.

Edgar’s nephew shakes his head again and turns toward the television. Edgar can see another bite start to form on his nephew’s forehead.

VII.

Edgar would like to not be at the zoo. He would like it to not be 3 AM, but 3 AM is the only time he even has a chance. There are guards. Of course there are guards. There are cameras, and alarms, and locked doors, so of course there have to be guards. But Edgar has a crowbar, and he is fast. Despite not having a need to run for some time, Edgar remembers he is fast as he climbs over the fence.

His sister still won’t talk to him, though she knows what’s happening is not Edgar’s fault. Edgar does not mind, does not blame her. Some things make people beg to stop talking, even when the people around them need them to talk. Edgar’s sister has no one she can stop talking to other than Edgar. He understands.

It’s a short distance to the back door of the aviary from where Edgar came in. Nobody’s seen him yet. He pries it open. He doesn’t hear an alarm, but he knows he must have triggered one. He does hear the chirps and screeches of the other birds his entrance has woken up. He runs down the narrow hall to the Ukrainian Tea bird, and smashes his way in through the feeder’s door. He raises his crowbar above the bird, but realizes the bird is already bleeding, or was already bleeding. Bite marks all over it. Dead.

And now there’s a bite mark on Edgar’s arm. He feels splintering teeth and he knows he is not alone in the cage, though he cannot see what else is there, so he swings, swings, swings, hoping to hit something. And the bite marks continue. He doesn’t stop to watch them form, but he can feel them: on his neck, his stomach, his temples, his knees, his bones, his heart. He won’t stop.

Edgar is a good babysitter, a good uncle. His sister will see this.

The post PseudoPod 589: Flash On The Borderlands XLII: Misanthropes appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Izzy Wasserstein
• Narrator : Tatiana Grey
• Host : Sarah Gailey
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
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PseudoPod 588: ARTEMIS RISING 4: The Good Mothers’ Home for Wayward Girls is a PseudoPod original.

This is Izzy’s first professional sale.

“While writing this story, I was thinking a lot about how many of the worst things we do to one another are done out of a desire to protect and keep safe, and how little surety we have that change will bring about improvement.”

The Good Mothers’ Home for Wayward Girls by Izzy Wasserstein

One of the Mothers shoves the new girl into the dorm room, the slick threads of the Mother’s grasp lingering long enough that several of us shiver. The new girl wears a short dress, shot through with sunset, though we are not sure we remember sunsets properly. The hem of the dress is ragged and mud-caked. It is the most beautiful thing we have ever seen. We hate the new girl.

Get her into uniform, the Mother commands. It makes no sound, but its words echo between our ears. The new girl has been standing with her hands on opposite shoulders, her chin jutting forward. That changes when we surround her. We rip the dress from her shoulders and toss a gray shift over her body. Now she is dressed just as we are.

The Mother squelches out of the room, and the door slams shut behind it.

The new girl is skinny, Kate says. Kate hates the new girl more than the rest of us, and is far more relieved that she has arrived.

Too skinny, Miranda agrees. You think you’re pretty, new girl? Miranda has been at the Good Mothers’ Home the longest of any of us. She has not been the new girl in a very long time, but she is not inclined to mercy.

My name is Bel, the new girl says.

No one cares, new girl. Kate shoves her. The new girl stumbles back, then raises her fists. There is something in her eyes we recognize. Not all new girls have it. Kate, who was the new girl for a long time, did not have it. Kate is caught, now, picking a fight with someone who will not cower like she once did.

Say that again, the new girl demands. Kate hesitates.

The great clock in the hallway strikes NIGHT. A Mother outside the door forces a word in our heads: Bed. We scramble into our bunks. The gas lamps flicker and die. The new girl does not move.

Bed. The voice in our heads is louder the second time. It feels like a rat scratching behind our eyes.

Get in bed, new girl, we shout, and Jaq cracks her knuckles. The new girl gets into bed, and the Mother’s pressure in our minds fades.

Kate says: If you get us in trouble, new girl, you’ll pay. We’ll make you pay. Kate has scars down her back that were not there when she arrived.

When she thinks the rest of us are asleep, Molly tiptoes over to the new girl’s bed. Welcome to The Home, new girl, she says. The new girl does not respond. We fall asleep wondering if we hear scratching and scraping noises outside.

In the morning–that is, when the gas lamps ignite–the new girl’s dress, which we left on the floor, is gone. We shuffle down to the bathroom. No one bothers to tell the new girl what is happening. She doesn’t ask. Kate hangs back and stage-whispers: You’re not going to survive, new girl. The Mothers will punish you or you’ll slit your wrists. Kate is brave because there are Mothers watching us, one in the doorway to the kitchen, one clinging to the ceiling, leaving a puddle of ichor on the moldy tile of the hall. We will need to clean up that mess later.

No. We will make the new girl do it.

A Mother oversees us in the bathroom, its undulating form sliding like a misplaced shadow out of the corner. We do not understand the Mothers, but we know some things they hate, like fights and uncleanliness. This means Kate cannot hurt the new girl the way she would like (we can feel the ache coming off her like heat from the ruin of her back). But she can still use words. Skinny, she says. Look at those ribs. We join in, because we hate the new girl. The new girl does not cry, though her face reddens. We remember that she did not scream when the Mother touched her.

We leave the bathroom. The great clock reads DAY, but the light that spills in from the windows high above us does not look like what we remember of daylight. We doubt Miranda remembers daylight at all. Now we mark time like this: when the clock strikes NIGHT, we hide in our dorm until DAY returns and the lamps ignite. Some of us remember a girl who snuck out at night. We cannot forget her screams.

We eat breakfast at the long table in the dining hall. The porridge is slightly bitter, which Jaq prefers to bland, but Molly retches at the taste. When the new girl goes to take a bite, Kate knocks her bowl away. There are no Mothers watching, no one to punish her.

The new girl stands up. She is shorter than Kate and lighter, but even Jaq tenses. Kate’s eye widen but she does not stand.

Let’s settle this, the new girl says. We don’t know where the fierceness in her comes from. Were we ever like that? we wonder, and then hate her more for making us ask.

Kate looks down at the chipped tabletop. The new girl grabs her porridge and sits down.

After breakfast, we do our chores. Chores build character, the Mothers remind us often. We will refine you. We scrub floors that never come clean, whitewash peeling wallpaper, prune the gray-leafed trees in the enclosed garden. Over time, we have cleaned the whole of the Home, the dorm room, the dining hall, the kitchen, the bathroom. There is so much to clean. Miranda thinks there used to be many more Wayward Girls, because there are so many empty bunks, so much empty space. But we cannot be sure.

You’re cleaning up after the Mothers, new girl, Miranda says.

I am not, says the new girl. She plants her feet and crosses her arms.

Do it, Kate says, or we’ll hurt you.

Shut up, Kate, Miranda says. New girl, clean it or we’ll make sure it costs you. Show her your back, Kate.

Kate cringes. Her shoulders hunch. I don’t want to, she says.

Do it now, Miranda says.

Kate’s gaze is a well of bitterness. She turns and lifts the rough fabric over her head. The new girl looks.

The Mothers will do worse than that, Molly says. She was not the new girl for long, and still has some sympathy left. The new girl stands very still. Then she grabs a pail and sets to work.

On her second night, the new girl takes a piece of broken glass and makes two scratches on the wall above her bed. We loudly take bets on how long she will keep that up.

That night we are almost sure we hear a snuffling outside the walls of The Home.

The new girl has made many, many scratches by the morning of the fight. Kate has stopped trying to fight the new girl, because Kate is a coward. That is why we hated her for so long, we tell ourselves. Only Molly doesn’t hate Kate, because Kate became the new girl so soon after Molly.

Kate does not want to fight the new girl, but she wants her to bleed. The new girl talks about feeling the wind blow across her arms, and about the tang of sourdough between her lips. She talks about the smell of the sea, the feeling of gravel between her toes. Kate hates her, and grows clever in her desire to hurt. She waits for Jaq to have a bad day. And Jaq does when a Mother spreads its ichor all over the garden and makes Jaq clean it.

We never know why the Mothers do what they do. Miranda once told us that, long ago, a girl asked, and a Mother said For your protection, sweet thing, and wrapped its appendages around the girl. After that, the girl didn’t ask any more questions. She just stood, slack-mouthed, drooling.

This time the Mother makes Jaq clean the garden for so long she is late for dinner, rushing to fill her plate before it is too late, before we are shepherded to the dorm, before the clock strikes NIGHT.

Kate waits until Jaq is walking to the table with her tray, then shoves the new girl backwards off the bench and into Jaq. The porridge spills everywhere. The new girl struggles to her feet and turns to Kate, eyes burning with hate. But Jaq stands almost as fast and she tackles the new girl.

They scramble on the floor. The new girl is clever and vicious. She jabs her thumbs at Jaq’s eyes, bites and claws. But Jaq is much stronger, and thinks she used to be a fighter, before the Mothers took her in. And she is covered in ichor.

Jaq has so much rage. It is frightening to watch. Even Kate looks away.

We see the Mother coming, but Jaq does not hear our hissed warnings.

Enough, the mother says. The word rattles our skulls in its fury. Jaq freezes and stands up. The ichor that pools beneath her is streaked with blood. Jaq shakes. The Mother will discipline her, perhaps take her away forever. It has happened before.

Look at this mess, the mother says. Kate bursts into sobs.

Somehow, the new girl is on her feet. She braces herself against the table. She is bleeding from her lip, from her nose, from a dozen cuts. Her eye is already swelling.

Tell me, the Mother orders.

Tell you what? the new girl asks. Molly gasps.

Tell me what she has done, the Mother says, and its oily appendage taps Jaq on the forehead, leaving a further smear on her brow. Jaq cowers.

We fell, the new girl says. It’s nothing.

We stare at her, our mouths hanging open.

Do not lie to me, girl, the Mother says. It is unbecoming. It draws the last word out until it echoes between our ears. Molly claws at the skin on her arms.

It was an accident, the new girl says.

The Mother slides very close to her. It reeks of honey and rotted meat. The new girl is shaking. The new girl does not look away. You must both be corrected, the Mother says.

Two days later, a Mother shoves Bel and Jaq back into the dorm. Bel’s wounds have not healed. The two girls are holding hands. They remind us of ships that have broken against a reef. They do not meet our eyes. We are very quiet.

The clock strikes. The lights burn out. In the darkness, we hear Jaq climb into Bel’s bed. In moments, they are asleep in one another’s arms.

In the morning, Bel asks how long it has been. When we tell her, she makes the marks on the wall above her head. Afterwards, she stares at the shard of glass for a long time. Jaq stares at her.

That night we are listening for the clock when Bel, perched on the end of her bunk, says, Why do we do what they say?

Shut up, new girl, Kate says.

You shut up, Jaq says, and Kate flinches.

Because they will hurt us, Miranda says.

Or kill us, Molly says.

Because of the things outside, Jaq says, very softly. Everyone goes quiet, but it is not yet NIGHT, and there are no sounds beyond the walls.

Death would be better than this, Bel says.

Would it? Miranda asks.

The clock rings. The lights go out. I think we’re already dead, Kate says.

I’ve seen bodies, Miranda says. We can die.

Thank god, Bel says.

Outside we think we hear a scraping. It may be the wind in the trees. We listen for a long time.

If I have to die, I want to die on my feet, Jaq says. I would like that. Her words are an appeal to Bel. There is no answer.

Kate cries in her bed. We don’t know if it is because she is afraid of death, or the Mothers, or because Bel is no longer the new girl. Molly slips to her bed and whispers in her ear.

Get away, Kate hisses. I don’t want your help. Molly slinks back to her bed. She is the kindest of us, but that does not mean she did not leave scars.

The showerheads are spitting out brown water with the fetid odor of a swamp. We stand outside the spray, dejected. Miranda is the most dejected, because we have been trading days on ichor duty, and yesterday was hers.

Good girls must shower, says a Mother.

It’s broken, Kate says, then claps her hands over her mouth.

The Mother slurps across the scummy tile. What did you say?

It’s broken, Bel says. We all stare, wondering why she has stepped forward for Kate, who she hates, and wondering if she means to die now.

It’s broken and we can’t use it, Bel says.

Girls must shower, the Mother says. When you were wayward, you did not shower and you were unclean.

The water isn’t clean, Jaq says. She steps up beside Bel. We know she will not survive without Bel.

There is a roar behind our eyes. We all stagger. Molly falls to the wet floor, clutching her face. You will be reformed. Or you will suffer.

Bel balls her hands into fists. You horror, she says. We won’t shower. We won’t be your good girls.

The pressure in our heads builds. Our heads feel like gas-filled corpses ready to burst. One by one, we collapse. When we are lying on the ground, bleeding from our ears, clutching our knees to our chins, the Mother speaks.

Then you are not worthy of our protection. The pressure breaks. We blink and slowly uncurl ourselves. The Mother is gone, its ichor mixing with the water, sluicing down the drain.

Where did it go? Bel asks, as though this a trick she has not seen. None of us have seen it.

Molly? Kate asks. We turn. Molly’s open eyes stare at the ceiling.

I told you, Miranda says very quietly, and we feel something break in her.

After a long silence, Kate insists we bury her.

That’s what you do, she says. That’s what people do when their friends die. I remember that.

We look at each other uneasily. We don’t say: you weren’t friends. We don’t say anything.

We see no Mothers as we take Molly’s body to the garden. The house is silent, save for the wind, the scraping of trees against the walls. The ground is hard. We dig with our hands, with spoons from the kitchen, with bits of stone. There are many roots and many rocks.

Do you think they are really gone? Jaq asks.

It’s a trick, Kate says.

They’ve never gone away before, Miranda says, in the small voice.

Good riddance, Bel says.

No one is protecting us, Miranda says. No one will protect us.

From what? Bel asks. But she knows. We all know: the things beyond the walls, the ones that make the noises.

We have only dug a couple feet deep when the clock rings. The lights die. We stumble through the building, clutching each other, moving as fast as we can. The fact that we are not in complete darkness suggests that perhaps somewhere, behind many clouds, is a sliver of moon.

We find the door to the dorm. It creaks open, echoing down the hallway. We slip inside. No one goes to their bunk alone. Kate curls up with Miranda. We have an even number now.

The chuffing wakes us in the middle of the night. We listen, each of us clutching the hands of another. There are heavy breaths and snorts and sounds like forks being scraped across empty plates. The thing on the outside walks back and forth across the base of the wall, and we do not sleep.

The sounds only stop when the lamps ignite. We listen for a long time, though it is DAY. Then Miranda cautiously opens the door. There is nothing in the hall, no Mothers, nothing from outside.

We go to the kitchen and slip behind the counter. We find a thick door. The door turns with a great handle, like a bank vault. This is where they keep the food, Jaq says.

We’ll starve, Kate says, but with effort we pull the door open, and inside is porridge, great drums of it stacked high. We pry one open, eat it in silence, then go outside and dig again. We make little progress.

You’ve killed us, Miranda says. It will find a way in, soon. The Mothers kept it out.

You don’t know that, Bel says.

You think the Mothers are the worst thing we can fear, Miranda says. They were our protectors.

We could beg them to come back, Kate said. They might be listening.

Never, Bel says.

You just want to die, Kate says. We try not to look at Molly’s body. You don’t care if you die.

The walls are high, Jaq says. We can live here. Together. She is looking at Bel intently. Don’t die, her eyes say.

This isn’t living, Bel says. For a long time there is only the sound of us digging and the sniffles as Jaq wipes at tears we pretend not to see.

When we are three feet deep, we hit rock, and so we bury Molly there, among the shallow roots and stone.

She was kind, Jaq whispers.

Too kind, Miranda says.

Not kind enough, Kate says.

We should mark her grave, Miranda says. We plant three sticks in the ground by her head. It is the best we can do.

We are back in the dorm room when the clock strikes NIGHT.

The thing outside doesn’t wait. It sniffs. It grunts. It claws at the ground and at the walls. The sounds of its claws are like glass shattering.

It stops. We do not dare to breathe.

A huff, and the glass-breaking sound is far up the outside wall. We scramble from our beds. We hear it leap again, hear the impact even higher, close to the windows far above us. It has our scent. We rush from the room. Behind us, we hear the shattering of the windows, or maybe claws against concrete. It roars. The sound fills The Home like the Mothers’ words filled our minds.

We run. The kitchen, Miranda says.

The door to the dorm bursts open.

We rush through the kitchen, Jaq leading the way. The porridge, she gasps.

The roars of the thing echo. The shattering sounds are close behind us.

Jaq spins the handle. We pull at the door. Something loud cracks behind us.

The door slides open.

Go, Miranda says. Hu–

A splatter of something wet and warm catches us. Miranda gurgles once, and falls to the ground. The thing behind her is a dark geometry, a series of sharp angles, with limbs like sabers.

It bends down to feed.

We get past the door, slam it behind us. We hear the crunching from outside. The door is thick, but does not block out enough of the sound. Eventually, we hear cracking and slurping, a sound like a dog worrying at a bone.

Then the claws rake at the door. We clutch our heads and try not to think of Miranda, nor Molly. We sit shaking, curled amongst one another. The thing from outside does not grow tired. It does not stop seeking entrance.

But then the sounds stop suddenly. We hope day has arrived, but we are afraid it may be a trick. We listen for a long time. No one speaks. The door creaks open, and we flinch, but Kate has opened it. Light spills in. There is nothing waiting for us but a smear of blood.

We have to call the Mothers back, Kate says. We have to beg them.

Do you think they will come back? says Jaq.

We have to try, Kate says.

We have to leave, Bel says.

We stare at her. Leave? Jaq says. Go outside? Where that thing is?

That thing is in here now, too, Bel says.

Why are you always trying to die? Jaq demands.

Bel scratches at her arm. Once, she says, back when I could wander, I found a stream, and the bank was thick with mulberries. I ate until my mouth and hands were stained purple. I ate until I was nearly sick, then slept in the sun.

Don’t torture us, Kate says. Please.

I can’t remember what they tasted like, Bel says.

It’s better to forget, Jaq says. Easier.

I don’t want to forget. Not ever, Bel says.

When you die, you forget everything, Jaq says.

The silence stretches. Bel reaches into the open drum and scoops out handfuls of porridge. She eats hurriedly.

I’m leaving, she says. Climbing the garden wall and leaving. Please don’t make me go alone.

We think Bel is right, that she may be right. We will go with Bel. We think we will go with her.

The post PseudoPod 588: ARTEMIS RISING 4: The Good Mothers’ Home for Wayward Girls appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : N.R. Lambert
• Narrators : M.K. Hobson  and Tina Connolly
• Hosts : David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 587: ARTEMIS RISING 4: When the Slipling Comes to Call is a PseudoPod original.

Spoiler Inside SelectShow I found the seed of this story in an odd little remnant of a dream. In the dream, I opened my door and discovered a small faceless doll at my feet. I bent to pick it up and just as I turned it over, I abruptly woke. The rest of the dream was lost forever, but that image stuck with me all day–the colors bleak and muted, and the weight of people’s eyes on me, even though I was alone at my door. It became the prompt for “When the Slipling Comes to Call.” While I wrote it, I was thinking a lot about the ways in which large groups of people can be controlled with different types of fear, how compliant we can become to all sorts of atrocities in the name of “not making trouble” or “being a good citizen” or because “it’s always been this way.” I wanted (and maybe even needed) to see someone overcome that. Against the backdrop of larger national and global unrest, so many of us also live personal revolutions every day just by continuing to exist and persist, despite pervasive systematic biases and abuses. Those personal revolutions add up, so I felt it was important to make Madeline a person who had played by the old fear-based rules right up until she decided to resist–even if she failed against the Slipling, I felt she’d won something just by changing her outlook and trying to change the system. When the Slipling Comes to Call by N.R. Lambert

She rises. The ache of eons and a cold night brittle her bones. She cracks them one at a time, and sometimes all at once, like tree branches snapping in an ice storm. The stone floor of the hovel is chilled with October’s first frost, but it doesn’t bother her, her feet never need touch the floor. She hovers over it, knotted fingers dragging tangles of dark hair from her face and eyes.

Her slick black tongue flicks the melting frost from her flaky gray lips as she goes about gathering the scraps of bone, hair, and skin she needs to make her Littles. One by one, she stuffs them with dead leaves and other rot. She ties off the dollies’ necks with gut string, then tops each Little with a smooth clay head–the vessel–blank faces reflecting nothing of their fates or those of the ones to whom they’re tied.

The Slipling fills her basket.

Madeline doesn’t need to see the ice creping the warped kitchen windows to know this will be the first night. She sensed its arrival days earlier and made herself ready. She’s not the only one who feels it. The children are already singing the old rhymes as she makes her way to the market.

“Bless your loveds and say your prayers

The Slipling comes tonight

To Harvest souls for the year

The Slipling comes tonight

Can’t hide your children, hide your loveds

The Slipling finds them all

To fill her basket with their breath

When the Slipling comes to call.”

Their voices drift against the stone houses, echoes collecting in the alleys leading to the village square. Madeline tugs at her shawl, wrapping it tighter around herself and the infant snuggled against her chest.

“The Seeding is the first night

Her dollies on your steps

The Harvest is the second night

The reaping of your breath.”

The morning fog hasn’t burned off yet; the children’s voices seem to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Madeline’s footsteps slip into the meter.

“Beneath the frost, beneath the shadows

The Slipling comes at night

To leave her dollies at your door

The Slipling comes tonight

So bless your loveds and say your prayers

And hope by morning’s light

That when the Slipling comes to call

She skips your door that night.”

By the time Madeline reaches the square, she catches herself humming along with them.

The market’s usual raucous buzz is a low murmur today, fear hushing the sellers and shoppers–all except for the Crone who peddles medicines and charms from beneath the arch of the burned out temple. Her curled fingers–tips missing from each of them–clutch knotted sacks of herbs, shaking them against the damp air.

“The Seeding’ll be tonight!” she calls out to tight-faced villagers hurrying past. The Crone has lived in the village longer than anyone can remember. But unless they’re in need of some doctoring–a salve for sore shoulders, a tonic to keep barren–the villagers try to forget she exists. They’ve already forgotten her name; and but for Madeline, they’ve also forgotten the Crone’s sacrifice, what she tried to do for them all.

The Crone targets another cluster of women. “Prayers won’t guard you none, but perhaps something else will…” Pinch-mouthed, they hustle past her, waving their hands before them as if she were smoke from a snuffed out candle.

As Madeline watches, the Crone casts her gaze across the courtyard, and meets Madeline’s eyes once before glancing away.

The villagers consider Madeline unlucky; most would even say cursed–at least when they think Mizzy Madeline isn’t listening. She is though, cursed that is. She’s listening too; she just doesn’t pay them any mind.

This Harvest will be different though, she’s seen to it. That is, if she lives to see it through…if they both do. Madeline watches the Crone a moment longer, waiting for a sign, but the old woman’s eyes don’t stray toward Madeline’s again. A message in itself, she supposes, turning to weave her way toward the farmers’ stalls.

As she passes the woodsmith’s stand, Madeline can’t help but touch the gleaming hull of a large burl bowl on display. His work is good, but not as good as her husband’s. She sold most of it after, except for the birds. There are five of them at home, on a small shelf perched over her hearth. Five tiny wooden thrushes, one to mark each child they’d lost in other Harvests. He carved them of hawthorn before he was taken himself in the last Harvesting. She had no bird to mark him, but his hand on the others was enough. That and the baby. A surprise, one final gift, only a few months old now. She’d lost them earlier than this…and later too. But this one would be different.

The grain seller keeps his face lowered as he hands Madeline a sack of oats and takes her coin. She senses nearby villagers eyeing her as she pockets the change. Cursed. Unlucky.

Madeline turns toward home. The baby’s heartbeat flutters against her chest, a determined moth beating against the windows at night.

This one will be different.

With a basket full of dollies, The Slipling cuts a path to town, parting the night like a blade lancing a boil, filling the space she opens with something darker, more wretched.  The moon overhead, a bright shard of ice, scores a sky pockmarked with fast, low clouds. She flickers between the forest shadows, gliding at the periphery of dusk.

Until they got close, folks might think the Slipling was just a bitty child who’d wandered off; and in the early days, many a good-souled neighbor was lost trying to help her find her way home. But most folks knew better by now, especially on a night like this.

The Seeding is nearly as enjoyable as the Harvest itself. The Slipling’s dollies are her eyes to every grief stricken face–the fear, the screams, the agony. If the souls within the Littles are her supper, the suffering is her salt and spice.

She smacks her lips and swings her basket, back and forth, back and forth.

The empty Littles rattle.

The Slipling can hardly wait.

Madeline is not surprised to find the dollie on her threshold the next morning. It is the seventh time her home has been Seeded. The doll’s smooth clay face mirrors the low morning fog. It smells like a weeks-gone rat, hot and vile.

Shudders of motion from the alley and from behind the neighbors’ curtains flick at Madeline’s attention. They’re watching. Waiting for her reaction. Poor, cursed Mizzy Madeline, seeded again.

She closes her eyes, recalls six other Seedings. Six times she clutched that hideous thing in her hand, six times brought it into her home as she was supposed to do. Six times watched it take her loveds; and six times–contorted with grief–placed the dollie back on the threshold for the Harvesting.

Faint wailing drifts down from another alley. Madeline is not the only one to receive this unwanted gift.

The baby cries and Madeline opens her eyes. This time will be different.

She lifts her skirts a little and brings her heel down hard on the hollow clay head, grinding it into the stone. She steps back into the house and closes the door, leaving the doll where it lays and the neighbors where they hide.

The Slipling collects her Littles, each one ripe with a soul, each house oozing terror and anguish like runoff from rotted fruit. She doesn’t wait to sample the first one. Sticky grey saliva drips from her mouth as she reaches into her basket and plucks a dollie from the top. She sinks her black, spiny teeth into its head, sending crunching shards of clay spilling over her chin as the fresh life trapped within it slides down her throat.

She chews, pleased with the Harvest so far. But when she arrives at the last house, her pleasure curdles. Her hands shake as she picks up the ruined Little, its head crushed to dust.

The Slipling lifts her face to the moon and shrieks with rage. They have an understanding, she and this town. They don’t interfere none and she takes what she wants. What she needs. This kind of defiance won’t be tolerated.

She flings the dollie’s remains back on the threshold and melts away into blue shadows of the alley.

When she returns to her hovel, The Slipling drops her brimming basket at the door and digs around in her kit, yanking out a slick fistful of rotting mice and other bits.

She works all night.

This time, the neighbors do not bother to hide. When Madeline opens her door, they’re gathered in a loose crowd, grumbling to each other. They don’t understand how Madeline’s baby was spared. She knows the rules better than any of them. The Harvest should be over by now, the living safe for another year. Why does Mizzy Madeline have to go and make trouble? Why should her bad luck be spread about the village like a blight?

Madeline looks down. A new dollie on her threshold. She tries to stomp it again, but this one’s head is solid–enchanted or made of stone–and Madeline’s heel jumps from the sudden sharp pain of her effort. No matter. She plucks the gruesome thing off the ground and with half the town following behind her, marches it over to the lake and flings it in headfirst.

It sinks, barely leaving a ripple in the dark water.

The Slipling’s fury shakes the trees and rumbles over the mountains.

This will not stand.

It’s not a matter of hunger. She always takes more than she needs–already Harvested plenty to feed now and sleep until next year. Her basket is overfull, but she will not be defied.

She thought she’d learned them with the last one who tried to undo her. The one who almost did. Made them all watch as she bit off each of the shrieking witch’s traitorous fingertips so she’d never work her lore again. Wanted to chew up the rest of her too, but the Slipling figured a crumpled heap of woman would make a goodly reminder for the rest of them to stay in line. Even gave the witch a bit of the black touch to keep her around an extra long time, make sure she didn’t try ending herself.

It worked too. The Crone had made a fine enough warning, until now.

The Slipling sniffs the air for her Little, tracking it through the town’s winding alleys; she drags her hand along the walls, clawing deep scars into the stones.

Most folk are smart enough to be afraid. This fear is delicious–their feeble attempts to hide from her are as sweet as fresh baked bread on the air. But the Slipling can’t enjoy it until she has all her Harvest in.

She sniffs again, catches a whiff of algae and growls. The Slipling turns for the lake.

If they’re scared enough, the villagers might even put an end to this little uprising themselves. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them fell beneath a storm of stones at their neighbors’ wrathful hands.

But no, the Slipling wants to learn this one herself. She considers taking each and every one of the villagers, as punishment. But that would seal her own fate as well, being so tied to this place as she is. That was the deal she made with the darkest one, the deal she lived by for a millennium. Though it was a lot more effort in the early days.

There was that plague that nearly rotted her whole flock while she slept. Didn’t stop her from Seeding, but she had to keep her Harvest small. Went to bed hungry that year and for quite a few years after. She didn’t like that one bit.

Nor did she enjoy hunting down the strays–there were a lot of those early on. She spent too much of her sleeping time shadowing them through the woods. Had to make them believe she could still Harvest them even if they fled. But snatching up runaways wasn’t a proper Harvest. It was just her following and waiting for their vigilance to sag, so she could creep into their tents and ever so quietly pinch the lights from their eyes. A waste of souls, for certain, but worth it for the fear she gained.

If she lost her flock, she couldn’t Harvest; if she couldn’t Harvest the darkest one won’t get his tithe, and the Slipling didn’t think he’d like that. Not one bit.

The fear is what keeps her flock in check. Keeps him happy. Keeps her fed.

She supposes it’s time for another lesson; she’s been too easy on them. And maybe after she deals with this one, she’ll take all the mamas next year, or all the bitties and babies, make the whole town watch her feed…

Her rotted grin turns to a grimace as she draws near the lake.

The Slipling hates the water. But despite the raw burn of it against her flesh, she dives down, pushing herself deeper with furious kicks until she finds her sunken Little and drags it back to the surface. Huffing, she pulls herself above the water and glides over the lake, coalescing with the shadows at the edge of the woods.

She never notices the woman watching her from the rocks above.

Madeline has so little; still, she leaves most of it behind. Only the tiny shelf over the hearth is emptied. Some embers left glowing in the fireplace so it will look as if her house is still a home…

She watches from the charred shadows of the ruined temple as the Slipling glides to her door. Using her little fist as a hammer, the Slipling nails the dollie to the heavy wood; then, biting into her palm with an apple’s crunch, she smears a series of runes on the worn beams with sticky black blood.

The Slipling tilts her head back, opens her jagged mouth and screeches. Windows light throughout the village–they’re all awake, but no one dares go to their sills or doors, let alone goes to check on Mizzy Madeline.

Finally, the Slipling melts into the dark, as quiet as the weak moonlight.

The baby stirs, but does not make a noise as Madeline is gently drawn back into the ruins by the Crone’s mutilated touch.

Just one night remains.

The Slipling barely waits for the bluing hour to pass before she sets forth for town. This soul will be her most delicious. After she consumes every morsel of it before the grieving mother’s face, she’ll peel off the wench’s skin–strip by strip–and save it to be used for next year’s Littles. She’ll make certain every living creature in town watches. Hears. Knows.

No one will be getting any more ideas after this.

She hungers. This foolishness delays her feeding, keeps her from slipping back into darkness and sleeping for another year–the eternal life she bartered for can be lived only a few days at a time. Her moon is shrinking; the Slipling must nest soon.

The town shimmers ahead.

Madeline’s heart cramps with every head she crushes. They appear hollow, but she knows what treasures they hold. At least these ones will go on to peace. Her baby murmurs against her chest as she works.

When the last one is done, Madeline checks for spaces where the Slipling might hide an extra store. But the hovel is barely more than an animal’s den, scratched out of the earth by necessity and nothing more. It stinks of rot and death. She wishes to burn it, but there is no time. Besides, that is the Crone’s right, her release. She wouldn’t take any coin from Madeline for her aid; this was all she wanted.

Madeline wishes to be present for the end, but she can’t return to the village, now or ever again. What she’s done will affect them all. She knows it’s for the better, but they will not see it that way, not at first. Not until at least another year passes. But long before that, they will have stoned her and her baby for her actions.

The dark is lifting. She must leave, there’s a long way to go before the next nightfall. She stops at the door briefly–the final touch–before hurrying into the waning night.

The Slipling rages through town, clutching the empty Little in her shaking fist. She slams against doors and shatters windows, a storm of fury and disbelief.

The door was sealed, no way for the wench and her babe to get past. The Little should be filled with the Slipling’s victory, but instead–

She smashes it to the ground and howls again.

The villagers quake in terror, huddled in corners and under furniture–she feels their fear washing over her, but it brings her no pleasure.

Only the Crone is bold enough to stand at her window. She seems to grin, though it could just be her toothlessness. No matter. The Slipling won’t be mocked. She’ll Harvest the Crone first next year. But it will definitely need wait until next year. She’s too weak now; she needs her souls and her sleep.

The shadows scuttle out of her reach as the Slipling slides toward her den. Normally they grasp for her, carrying her along, but tonight they shrink. The sky is lightening. The wench cost her too much time.

The hovel is still drenched in darkness and as she reaches it, the Slipling feels comforted, if not restored. But when she shoves the door open, something clunks to the floor at her feet.

A Little, grimacing up at her, with the Slipling’s own hideous features clumsily carved into its wooden face.

The Slipling barely has time to scream before she is drained away, pulled into the dollie. Her feet touch the floor for the first time in a thousand years, and are quickly followed by the rest of her body as it collapses–lifeless, and unlifeless–to the stone.

The Slipling’s screech rattles the forest, driving sleeping birds scrambling for the sky. Madeline pauses, waiting, but the quiet that follows is unbroken.

It’s over then. The Crone will burn what remains, free herself. Flee a different way.

The morning’s first thrushes call as a creeping breeze brushes through the thick treetops. Madeline bends to kiss her baby’s soft sweet head and steps toward deeper woods.

The post PseudoPod 587: ARTEMIS RISING 4: When the Slipling Comes to Call appeared first on PseudoPod.