PseudoPod

• Author : Robert E. Howard
• Narrator : Andrew Leman
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

The Black Stone was first published in WEIRD TALES, November, 1931. It appears here by permission.

Andrew is one of the founders and proprietors of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and has produced and appeared in films, radio dramas, games, music and audiobook projects based on or inspired by Lovecraft’s work, most notably the motion picture of “The Call of Cthulhu” and the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series.

An audiobook of the Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft has been released and is available through the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society website. If you’ve listened to any of Andrew’s narrations over on the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, you owe it to yourself to grab this collection. The newest episode of the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre — “The Rats in the Walls” — should be released by Thanksgiving in time for some wholesome family dining experiences.

Also, check out the Cromcast, which is working through Howard’s impressive catalog of fiction.

The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard

“They say foul things of Old Times still lurk In dark forgotten corners of the world. And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights. Shapes pent in Hell.” –Justin Geoffrey

I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless Cults in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of rare literature were familiar with Nameless Cults mainly through the cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when the manner of the author’s demise was bruited about, many possessors of the book burned their volumes in panic.

The post PseudoPod 569: The Black Stone appeared first on PseudoPod.

Hi there! A short metacast to tell you all about our new websites. Transcript follows for those who who prefer to read along.

Transcript

(Alasdair) Hi there! This is Alasdair!

(Marguerite) And this is Marguerite!

(Alasdair) And we’re looking a good deal shinier. The EA family of podcasts has all new websites, thanks to Jeremy Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios and Scott Pond for the incredible new logo designs! And to Marguerite for riding herd on the project for most of this year.

(Marguerite) Why thank you! So you may be asking yourself, why? I mean, we’re podcasts, right? Most of the time you listen to our shows, not read them. Well, we’re glad you asked.

(Alasdair) First off, we were a decade-old company with decade-old websites. It’s true – aside from maintenance from our heroic two-fisted IT Barbarian, Graeme Dunlop, EA’s never had a major upgrade. That won’t cut it for a digital publisher, especially one with 1900 episodes under its belt. It was a major undertaking, and past due.

(Marguerite) Plus now we’re in a great position to make that vast back catalog a whole lot easier for you to get at. But we ran into a chicken and egg problem – all the solutions we had in mind needed new interfaces and graphics. You probably saw that when our old logos got upgrades so we could be a launch offering at Google Play. But to make the leap to ‘Tubes and ‘Camps and ‘Fys’, needed a ground-up refresh.

(Alasdair) So, big thanks to Jeremy and Scott, and Marguerite

(Marguerite) (thank you!)

(Alasdair) and Graeme and the tireless work of the editorial teams and admin staff who kept this project upright and moving.

(Marguerite) And most of all, from all of us, thank YOU. Thank you do our donors and listeners, new and veteran, on PayPal, Patreon, Dwolla and more. Thanks to everyone who says hello at a convention, votes for us in awards and reviews the great stories we publish. Thank you to our authors, narrators, guest hosts and artists.

(Alasdair) And stick around for more.

(Marguerite) More tales to tell.

(Alasdair) One story told well. that’s what we do. And we promise you, it’s true.

The post EA Metacast: New Websites appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Kristi Demeester
• Narrator : Jacquie Duckworth
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 568: The Room in the Other House is a PseudoPod original.

The Room in the Other House by Kristi DeMeester

I’ve counted the moments we once had over and over. Tried to hold them in my hands as if they were solid, but in the end, there is nothing except for the dark scar tracing against my palm. If I squint, it looks like a worm. If I squint, it’s almost like you’re still here.

We found the house when we weren’t looking. Driving along back roads because there was nothing else to do. We’d had too much to drink the night before and needed coffee and open air that tasted of rainwater and the cloying scent of rotting wood. You took the turns too fast, and I squealed and pretended to be angry, but you grinned through all of it, and it was the kind of dangerous smile I loved.

“What if we just never went back?” you said, but it was a conversation we were always having. There was the house we’d just moved into. The one with the extra two-stall garage and bonus room. Space for your workshop. Space for all of that scrapped metal you called a “project.” There was the dog we adopted together when we decided this thing we were doing was more forever than not. There were Monday mornings and paychecks and doctor’s appointments and phone calls. We were not the kind of people to disappear.

And then you did.

You drove, and I let my eyes drift closed and ignored the dark star of a headache that had begun to form. When I opened my eyes, I didn’t recognize the road. The houses were more spaced out. A bleeding away from suburbia into country. Here and there, barbed wire fence lined the road, but there was no livestock penned behind it.

“Where are we?” I said.

You shrugged. “You got somewhere to be, pretty lady?”

“Got a hot date tonight. I need to shave,” I said, but it was loud with the windows down, and you didn’t hear. If you’d heard, you would have laughed.

You should have turned around. When you saw the sign, you should have turned around.

These are the things I tell myself now. The ways I trace my way back to you. Small consolations for all of the mistakes we made that day.

“The hell does that say?” you said when we passed the first sign. Only, it wasn’t a sign. Not really. Two planks of wood nailed together to form the top of a triangle, the bottom piece missing. A phrase painted in green and in all capitals.

“It’s too small,” I said, and then we were past it.

There were no more houses. Only fields and trees and the sky gone dark overhead with the threat of a storm, and your hand on my thigh and slipping up and under the skirt I wore, and there was no one to see us under that broad, unending sky, and I unbuckled your pants and took you in my mouth, and you worked your hand against me, and I came before you did.

It had been years since we’d done that. Like a couple of horny teenagers who’d managed to steal an hour alone, all fumbling hands and wet mouths. I left your jeans unzipped, and you drove with one hand on the wheel, and the other still kneading my thigh.

“There’s another one of those fucking signs,” you said, and this time you slowed down, came almost to a full stop, and leaned out the window. There are times when I think that I reached for you then. My fingers grasping for your shirt, your arm, your hand, any solid thing that would call you back to me, but then my memory is made up of all of these small betrayals, and I think that maybe I didn’t.

“The Father of Lies,” you said and popped the door.

“Get back in the car. You’re going to get us killed. We can’t just be stopped in the middle of the road.”

“You see anyone else out here? Just hold on a second.” You leaned further out, further away, and I turned to watch behind us.

“So fucking weird. The Father of Lies,” you said, but you didn’t close the door.

“Probably some Jesus thing. You know. Repent ye sinners, and all that stuff. Watch for The Father of Lies. He’ll eat your soul,” I said. You didn’t laugh. You didn’t move. Something cold crept along the back of my neck, but I told myself it was the wind or a bug or any of the other things you tell yourself when you don’t want to believe what’s in front of you.

“I don’t think so. It’s something different. Sounds like a scary movie,” you said. You did move then, the door slamming shut behind you, but the engine idled, and you still looked at the sign and lifted your finger in the air, traced the outline.

“Would you come on already? Let’s go,” I said. You turned away then, your hands back on the wheel, and we were moving again, and I tried to settle back into the quiet I’d found earlier, but everything inside of me had gone heavy and light at the same time. Like iron covering something hollow.

“Jesus. They’re everywhere,” you said and pointed. Ahead, the road twisted away, but dotted along the black top where at least five more of the signs. All that strange triangle with no bottom, the neat, green lettering. The Father of Lies.

“Let’s just turn around. Go back,” I said.

“It’s fine. It’s some weird church thing. Like you said. Right?”

“Yeah. Okay,” I said, but you rolled up your window. I like to think you did that for me. To make me feel safe.

When I dream now, everything is green, but you are not there.

You had slowed down to go around a turn—the kind that kids call The Widowmaker and race their bikes down—when I saw the house. It stood just off of the road, was not set back like most houses in the country. The windows were busted out, the wood on the porch rotted and the steps sagging. Another abandoned house in the woods. The kind people write books about.

I didn’t see the toddler until we rounded the corner, the road still curving so you braked even more, and we were moving as if underwater, as if each movement was a slower precursor to something larger.

There was a large, spreading oak tree in front of the house. A monstrous, gargantuan thing that someone would tell you to cut down in case a nasty storm came through. Exposed, gnarled roots against dark earth. A lovely, terrible thing that cast long shadows.

The toddler was underneath the tree, sprawled on his back, his hands dancing through the air as if conducting music only he could hear. Under the tree, he looked fragile, too small to be alone, but he was alone. The house was empty, and there were no other cars, no adults pondering the landscape or taking pictures or changing a flat tire.

“Slow down a second,” I said, and my skin prickled. I craned my neck, looked back to be sure. The toddler still lay on the ground, his pudgy hands lifted to the sky.

“I got it. It’s not like I’m going to flip the car.”

“No. There’s a kid back there. A little kid. Under the tree. I’m pretty sure he’s by himself.”

Your mouth turned down at the corners, and you squinted up into the rearview mirror, and it’s these small moments I miss the most. How your face would move as you were thinking or how when you slept, there were tiny lines next to your eyes. I wonder how long it will be before I start to forget these things.

“You probably just can’t see them,” you said, but you slowed the car again, and I unbuckled and turned around in the seat. The toddler was still there, under the tree, but his hands were at his sides now and his eyes closed, as if he’d drifted off to sleep. Panic slick against my tongue, I watched his chest, my heartbeat slowing just a bit when I finally saw the rise and fall of his breathing.

“There’s no one back there,” I said. You reversed the car then, backed up so that I could see the toddler more clearly. He couldn’t have been more than two with the kind of curling golden hair that make women coo and run their fingers through it. He was dressed simply. A navy shirt and khaki shorts. A pair of dark shoes.

“Stop,” I said. The car jerked beneath us. You’d braked too suddenly. I think it was because you’d finally seen him, too. “You see? There’s no one else around.”

“Holy shit.” Your voice dropped to a whisper.

“Who just leaves their kid in the middle of goddamn nowhere?”

“Maybe they’re around back, or something?”

“We would have seen them when we passed the house. There’s no one out front; no one in back. There sure as hell isn’t anyone inside. You can see straight through the windows to the back. Empty.”

“Okay. Hold on,” you said and looked behind you, backing the car up even further to pull off onto the shoulder.

I’d looked away from the toddler, just for a second to do another sweep of the land, the house, to see if there was someone, anyone, we had missed. A blur of skin and hair hidden behind a tree or a flash of color, a shirt or a pair of jeans, against the green. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds, maybe ten, but when I looked back, the toddler had vanished.

I grasped your shoulder. “He’s gone.”

“What?”

“He’s gone. He’s not there anymore,” I said, and you peered past me, your mouth set in a thin line.

“He’s there,” you said and pointed, and my entire body sagged, the air rushing out of me. I turned to look. Through the busted out windows, I could see him. The toddler had gotten up and wandered inside the house, his chubby little legs jutting out from his shorts that were too small. I could see the dirt on his hands. It made me feel sick, and I remember thinking how strange it was, how awful to look at this child and feel as if I was coming apart, but then the toddler stepped away, and I saw what it was he was moving toward. A fire burned inside the main room. Flames leapt toward the ceiling and flickered just beneath the crumbling plaster.

“There’s a fire. Inside the house. Was there a fire before?” I shook my head. Couldn’t remember. There had been only those open windows like wide hungry mouths gaping around darkness. The trees. The grass. So much silence in this empty place. There had not been a fire, but it was possible I had not seen, possible that this was a new angle and I missed it before. Perhaps there was an adult here who had built it, someone to care for this tiny creature standing transfixed before the jumping flames.

“I don’t think so,” you said.

“I didn’t see…” I trailed off. The toddler crept forward, his hands outstretched as if to catch himself if he fell, but there was a part of me that saw it as an obscene mockery of prayer. But he was a child. Could barely talk. He wouldn’t be doing this. Couldn’t be.

“What is he doing?” you said and shifted forward so that you pressed against my back. This was the last time I touched you. The last time I felt your weight as something that was a part of myself. I’ve tried to call that sensation back, but I cannot remember anymore what it was really like. There is only the stain of it. A bleached out memory I cannot quite take hold of.

The toddler leaned forward, swaying in the way young children do when they are on the verge of losing their balance. “Oh my God,” I said because I knew what would come next, could see that terrible moment unfolding so that I could only reach for the door handle, my fingers banging against the metal and left aching, but I was too far away.

The child tipped forward, and I screamed.

In my mind, I still see those flames. Deep orange and almost beautiful. How they swallowed that small body in massive licks, the clothes, the hair, that smooth skin vanishing so quickly.

I heard you opening your door behind me, but I was moving, throwing open the rear car door to search for anything I could find that could smother the flames, and then I was running, an old towel clutched to my chest as I gasped out something like prayer or like please or like not yet, and I found that I was no longer screaming, my mouth opened wide, but the air around me plucked the sound from my lips.

I was up the front stairs and through the front door, which stood open on broken hinges. My hands shook because my body had memorized what it was I needed to do, but it knew what would come after, and the fear of seeing that small form shriveled and blackened was more terrible than anything I could conjure.

“Oh, God.” There was nothing else to say. Nothing else to do but run toward the wheeling column of flame, my arms extended.

I don’t know when you stopped following me. I didn’t think to look. I only know where I found you before I lost you again.

Before I threw the towel over the child, he turned to look at me, and I could see his face. A slight darkening around the mouth. His eyes so pale they were almost white, bleeding into the sclera. I thought he smiled at me. An impossible thing, but there is the memory, clear and bright, and even after everything that came later, I cannot forget the shape of his small teeth.

“Okay. It’s okay,” I said and threw the towel over him, ready to throw him to the ground and snuff out the flames. When I did, the towel met only air. It fell to the ground with a soft whump. There was no child there in that house. There was nothing.

I held myself still, a whine building in the back of my throat because I knew then that whatever I’d seen, it was wrong. Something that should not be, and I curled into myself, unable to leave this nightmare we’d stumbled into. A line of sweat crept down my neck, and the air tasted of something of foul.

I called your name, but the air was dead. Silent. No bird song or wind. Unnatural. I knew we needed to leave, get back into the car and drive away, not glancing back like Lot’s wife who died with the taste of salt on her lips.

But then I was trying to leave that terrible, empty place behind, and I was saying your name over and over until I knew that I was screaming again, but there was only the walls with peeling paint and exposed wood and gouged floors as if something monstrous had dragged its body over them.

When you answered, your voice sounded far away, but you were only in the next room. Down a small hallway in what looked like a bedroom, but it was too large to be a bedroom. The ceilings opened to the sky, and the floors seemed to stretch away and away. You faced the back wall, your hand against it as if I’d stumbled on you knocking.

“The kid. He disappeared. Just vanished into nothing. We have to leave. We have to leave right now. There’s something wrong here,” I said, and you glanced over your shoulder and then turned back.

“There’s a door. I saw it.”

“It doesn’t matter. We have to go. Now. Please,” I said. You lifted your hand and traced over the wall. I imagine there was dust on your fingers, some ancient reminder of what had once existed here, of whatever still lingered in the silence.

“Wait. Just a minute. Something’s here,” you said, and I remember how you stepped forward, how you pressed your mouth to the wall, how you opened it, your tongue trailing over that crumbling paint.

“Stop it,” I said, but you moaned, your back arching as if something inside of you longed to get out. I turned away, could not bring myself to touch you, to pull you from whatever terrible thing you’d found.

“I can open it. There’s a room there. In the other house,” you said, and you shifted forward, your fingers slipping under some latch I could not see. You grinned. Large. Toothsome. “See? Like the Father of Lies. Something you can see through and exist in at the same time.”

“Don’t. We don’t know what it is,” I said, but you were already through, and I tried not to think of how you’d mentioned the Father of Lies.

“Of course we do. It’s a room in the other house. I’ve already said.”

You went through the door, vanishing all at once into whatever lay beyond. I stood on the other side waiting for you to come back, but I could only hear your voice, the breathless, edgy rasp in it as if you’d been running for a long, long time.

When I heard the dog bark, I crept toward the door—nothing more than an extension of the wall that jutted outward—and called your name, but I did not look through. Not yet. I wonder if I hadn’t looked through, if you would have come back. But I did. And you were there, standing in the middle of a room with nothing in it. No furniture or curtains or pictures on the walls. Smiling and tanned and without the small paunch you’d been putting on over the past two years. Too much beer and too little exercise. The comfort of middle age and a stable relationship settling under our skins and leaving us as less than what we began.

Our dog—the Swiss Mountain Dog mix we’d adopted together because it was something that would belong to the both of us—sat beside you, her left ear cocked as if listening for a pitch we could not hear.

“It’s Nona. We must have left her here somehow,” you said, and Nona looked back at me, but it was not Nona. Not really. Her fur was a bit too thin. Too greasy looking. Her eyes lighter than they should be. Not the color of dark amber but of honey.

“It isn’t Nona. Come out. We have to go,” I said, and you scratched the dog behind the ears and cooed something at her.

“I’ll put her in the car, and we can go. Okay?”

My heart lurched, liquid and hot, in my chest. “No. We’ll get home, and Nona will be there, all curled up on her bed, waiting for us. And whatever that is—” I pointed at the dog. “What will it become once we get there? What will we have brought home with us?”

“Come in, love. Help me,” you said, and the dog opened its mouth then, but the sound that came out of it was not the sound of a dog. It was a child’s laughter. Then a scream.

“No. I want to go home,” I said, but my voice was next to nothing, and you turned and walked away, the motions of your body fluid and lovely and not the lumbering gait I’d memorized the night I fell in love with you.

The dog followed you, but its head still angled to face me, that terrible mouth still open as you turned toward some hallway I couldn’t see, and then you were gone.

I waited there outside of the door until it was dark, a damp chill creeping over my skin. I whispered your name. Over and over until it was a word I no longer recognized as something that had once belonged to me. I clenched the handle of the door tight enough to cut into the soft flesh of my palm. The scar has become a constant reminder that you have fallen into a place I cannot find.

Later, there were police officers. Your mother flew in from Arizona and we sat together at the little table you and I bought at the antique store and drank cup after cup of coffee as she asked the same questions over and over.

Why can’t they find him? How can an entire house just vanish? No one’s ever heard of anything called The Father of Lies. There are no signs about it anywhere. Not like you said. Are you sure it was a house? Are you sure of where it was? Are you sure?

            Always, I had the same answers, the same repeated phrases that added up to less than nothing. Her eyes and the thin line of her mouth grew harder every day until she left without hugging me goodbye.

The police asked those same questions, but with more technicalities. Was he unhappy? Had you argued recently? Was there any reason to believe he would have harmed himself? Are you sure of where the house was?

They searched the car. Our house. They interviewed everyone, asking what kind of person I was, if there was any reason to believe I could have committed some kind of violence against you.

After a year, they stopped asking, and you became another body vanished. Another person eaten by things we’ll never understand. And I’ve been waiting. All of this time. So many nights passing as I stare at the shadows on our ceiling and wait for the feeling of you pulling back the comforter to climb in beside me, the deep smell of your skin, but I am alone in this house that we found, the start of our life together thrown into this unnatural stasis.

It has been a year and a half since you walked into that room in the other house. The house I cannot find, on a road that doesn’t seem to exist. I’ve researched The Father of Lies but there’s nothing on the Internet except for thousands of entries about a Bible verse, but none of it adds up to anything that will bring you back. Nothing in any of the libraries I’ve visited, with their gray-haired ladies who twist up their mouths when I ask them if they’ve ever seen anything like that before.

I am different now. Thinner. The planes of my face are sharp and hungry. My hair cropped close so that I don’t have to brush it. I do not think you would fall in love with me if you saw me now.

It has been a year and a half of learning how to navigate around the space you left.

When the door appears in our house it is winter. A thin crust of snow lies over dead earth. There is a sky that looks drained of color, caught between gray and white. I am looking for the spare set of sheets we’d bought when I find it. Standing no taller than my shoulders and narrow, hiding in a place where there has never been a door before.

I know now that you are trying to find a way back to me.

I throw open the door and peer inside. It is a room I’ve seen before. In the other house. The one I cannot find.

The room in the other house is dark. Empty. I sink to the floor, clinging to the knob. You are not there. After all this time, you are not there.

“You have to be here,” I say into the darkness, and I hear something shift. A soft exhalation. A sound that could have been a sigh.

You do not emerge from the shadows, do not come rushing forward with arms outstretched, and I bite my wrist so I will not sob.

But then there is your voice, gentle and sweet, and you speak to me from the darkness, and the door seems to open wider, the whole world spilling forward.

“Where have you been? How did I lose you?” you say, and I cry out then, my hands trembling as I inch myself toward the threshold.

“Come out. Please. Follow my voice. I’m here,” I say.

“Come through so I can see you. I need to see you. Your face.”

Still, I see nothing in that room. Nothing that could be you, but your voice goes on and on. There is nothing else I want to hear.

“Come through the door. I’ve missed you so much,” you say.

I close my eyes. Extend my hands so they are inside the room where you were lost. The air is damp, and I hold my hands out to you, palm up, as if in supplication.

I lean forward and into the darkness breathe one word. I hope it will be enough.

The post PseudoPod 568: The Room in the Other House appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Caspian Gray
• Narrator : Elie Hirschman
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 567: Passover is a PseudoPod original.

Passover by Caspian Gray

One day there came a body that didn’t burn.  Tomek found her, because he was young, and because it was his job only to clean the ovens, not to fill them.  The body was covered in ash, streaked with it, but the hair wasn’t even singed.  Worse, it was a naked woman.  She would have been beautiful if he had found her anywhere else.

Tomek screamed.

The two men nearest him–friends of his father, both of them–came running.  No one from the pens ever escaped, but there was always that threat.  Even working in the rooms that held the ovens, you couldn’t forget the threat of them.

“I’m sorry,” said Tomek, when the men looked at him.  “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing,” Waclaw repeated.  “So don’t scream about it.”

Tomek nodded, trying to block their view into the oven with his body.  The men paid him no attention.  They had work to do of a more difficult, complicated nature than merely cleaning up.

Alone again, Tomek brushed the ash off her face, but not off her freckled breasts or the rest of her body.  The steam of his breath in the autumn air obscured her each time he exhaled.

There must have been some trick of the oven, of the way the bodies were situated, some air pocket that the fire didn’t eat.  There must have been a reason that she didn’t burn.  The right thing to do would have been to finish clearing out the rest of the ash and the bone shards and leave her pressed against the wall, waiting for more bodies to be crammed in next to her.

Instead he leaned close and exhaled a puff of air against her face, dislodging some of the ash in her eyelashes.  Her skin wasn’t even hot to the touch.

“Excuse me,” said Tomek, as he would to someone alive.  The corpse did not reply.

He realized, aware of his own absurdity, that he wanted to bury it.  Any woman who could survive the journey and the sorting and the pens long enough to make the ovens, and then emerge from the flames intact, deserved a kind of burial.  He’d never heard of such a thing.

Night would be on them soon.  The soldiers would come and tell him to go home; they didn’t like anyone to be outside at night.  Tomek had heard that other places didn’t sleep, that the ovens worked day and night, but that was not how things were done here.  They were respectable people who went home and slept when the day ended.

So Tomek buried the woman in ash again and then cleaned around her slowly, something he’d never dared to do before.  He considered it an act of courage not to work as fast as he could.  He did not think about what he would have to do next.

Waclaw told his father about the scream.  His father didn’t say anything, but Tomek could tell by the looks his father gave him as they walked home.  They took the long way, around the copses of trees that used to be the forest, so that they wouldn’t have to see the pens.

“I’m sorry,” said Tomek.

His father looked down at him.  “For what?”

“Nothing.”

“You should be careful,” said his father.  “These are delicate times.”

They did not discuss work at home in front of Tomek’s mother and his sisters, but in many ways things were better now than before the soldiers came.  There was always work, even for the village’s youngest men.  The soldiers brought the opportunity to buy food and alcohol that was never available before.  His sisters said they were a rich family now, that they would have to marry outside the village because they had grown used to such an extravagant life.  They laughed when they said such things.

Tomek washed his hands and his face, then changed his clothes.

His sisters filled the room with jokes and conversation.  They were beautiful girls.  Back when Tomek attended school, some of his friends had always walked him home, just to get glimpses of them.  Being with them now made his stomach twist up inside for reasons he did not completely understand.  He had already decided that he himself would marry a girl from outside the village, a girl from very far away, and then instead of bringing her home Tomek would go to her and live there.  It was not a very manly desire.

The soldiers were not as strict about curfew in the village as they were to the people in the pens.  Tomek never broke curfew, but Konstancja, the oldest of his sisters, did.  If sweet, pretty, vapid Konstancja could do it, then sneaking out without attracting attention must be easy.

Still, it took longer than he thought it would to find a shovel in the dark.

The soldiers did not patrol the ovens in the daylight very often.  No one here had ever tried to shut them down.  Even if some of the villagers did have the heart to fight, the ovens would not take priority over the pens, or over the showers, or over the barracks.

Tomek went through the trees instead of taking the road.  When he was as close to the ovens as he could get without leaving cover, he squatted in the underbrush and waited.  No jeep went by, no foot patrol.  He was sure that one had to be on its way, and the longer he waited the more it seemed that if he went out now, one of them would come upon him.

Still, there was nothing.  Perhaps there were no patrols at all.

He ducked low and crossed the road, then crept along towards the ovens.

Nothing.

Tomek went to the oven at the end of the row, leaving the door to the crematorium barely ajar.  If a patrol came by now, nothing would look amiss.

He swept away ash in the dark, trying to brush his fingers against the soft grit of her freckled skin.

There.

She was a little bit warm now.  The ash must have insulated the embers.  He took hold of her wrists and dragged her out of the oven and onto the floor.  Her body made little swishing, sighing sounds against the thin carpet of ash he could never completely sweep away.

If he were caught in the road now with the body of the woman, there would be no explanation.  Whatever he was doing, it was wrong.  Even to himself there was no justice in it, only whim.  Again he waited, just inside the door of the crematorium, clutching the body close to his chest.

No patrol.  Nothing.

He pushed the oven door open with his shoulder and did not try to close it again.  He dragged her as quickly as he could, keeping his eyes on the road and away from her nakedness.  She was not light.

As soon as they were back beneath the cover of the woods he stopped again, afraid of alerting someone, anyone, by dragging her through the dead leaves.  There was no one.  Perhaps it wasn’t a whim after all, to get so far without being caught.  Perhaps all of them deserved quiet burials, instead of the indignity of the ovens and the mass graves.

He waited for less time at the edge of the woods.  A patrol coming by and spotting him did not seem so likely now that he had been out for what felt like hours.  Tomek picked her up, though her weight made it difficult–if dignity was the point of burying her, dragging her through the dirt first could not be right.  He managed her, like a groom carrying a bride across the threshold, with the shovel handle nestled between her breasts.

When he was out of sight of the road he started digging.  The sound was louder than he’d expected.  Some of the tree roots were too thick to hack through with the shovel blade.  He looked over at her; the moonlight filtered through tree branches shifting in the wind, making her chest seem almost to move.

The grave was embarrassingly shallow, but with every breath of wind and crackle of leaves Tomek panicked.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured to the woman as he dragged her into the grave and then tried to arrange her limbs within it.  He prayed for a moment over her, not a proper prayer because he could not summon the words.  Then he covered her with dirt again, trying not to look as he buried her face.

He went home exhausted but satisfied, feeling that he had finally done something worthwhile.

There was murmuring at work the next day, because the crematorium door was left open.  If the soldiers said anything about it Tomek didn’t hear, but Waclaw mentioned it, in a tone that was tight with irritation.

“Be more careful,” he growled at everyone, and at Tomek in particular, because he was the one cleaning last night, and because he had gone home before the job was finished.  Tomek looked down at his grimy, ash-covered shoes and said nothing.  Wac?aw glared at him as though this was an admission of guilt, then moved on.

“Waclaw has his reasons,” said Tomek’s father as they ate their soup together in the fields, facing away from the ovens and the pens.  Tomek tried not to look at the ash trapped underneath his fingernails as he ate.  “He didn’t used to be such a nervous man.”

But Tomek didn’t think of Waclaw as nervous, he thought of him as dour and angry.

“Will this ever be over?” Tomek asked.

“What?” asked his father.

“This,” said Tomek, making his voice as wide and meaningful as possible.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They finished lunch.  Tomek wasn’t hungry afterwards, but he felt empty just the same.

He sneaked out again that night.  Tomek wanted to put flowers on the grave, but it was too late in the autumn for such gestures, so he settled for small branches wreathed with bright red and orange leaves.  It was frivolous.  It was stupid, too, but he felt that somehow he should apologize for the grave, and the dragging, and for the fact that she had ended up in the ovens in the first place.

The grave was empty.  The dirt had been shuffled and piled up alongside the hole.  Each vein in Tomek’s body beat with fear.  He had not hidden her well enough, and the soldiers had come and dug her up.

Someone coughed behind him.

Tomek dropped the bright leaves and spun around.  The woman was standing there, still naked, with hair as dark as dirt and skin pale in the moonlight.

“Oh,” said Tomek.

The woman coughed again.  She looked sick and insubstantial.

“Are you alright?” Tomek asked.  “I thought you were dead.  I’m so sorry, I was just trying to help.”

The woman sank slowly to the ground and then sat there, slumped.

“Are you hungry?” asked Tomek.  “Are you thirsty?  Are you…alive?”

She held up a hand and opened her mouth to speak, but only coughed again.  She looked at her mud-streaked hands with wonder.

“I’m still here,” she croaked.  “I don’t know.”

Tomek was silent.

Her face crumpled, and he thought she was going to cry.

“Please,” said Tomek.  “Should I get you some water?” They always brought the sick and the wounded water.  Even from the pens they could occasionally hear voices pleading for something to drink.

“I’m not thirsty,” she whispered.  Then she looked at him.  Tomek stood very still.  Her eyes were like wolf eyes, and his heart sped.

“Did you rescue me?” she asked.

Tomek shook his head.  “I mean, I took you out of the ovens, but you’d already…you’d already rescued yourself.”

She tilted her head and waited.

“You didn’t burn,” he explained.  “Your body didn’t burn like the others.”

“The others,” she repeated.  “Everyone?”

Tomek didn’t know who everyone was.

“I can’t bring you home with me,” he said.  “You have to leave.”

She tilted her head up like a dog sniffing the air.  “I’m staying here,” she announced.  Tomek shook his head.

“You can’t,” he said.  “That could get both of us killed.  I can get you some clothes, then you have to go.” He didn’t actually know where he could get her clothes.

The woman looked down at herself, at the tiny clumps of dirt that still clung to her flesh, and brushed off a few of them.

“I’m not leaving.  I don’t need clothes.”

“You’ll freeze,” said Tomek.

“I won’t.”

“You can’t stay here.”

She didn’t reply.  Tomek’s stomach felt like it was trying to climb up his throat.

“If you’re caught,” he said.  “Please don’t tell them that I helped you.  Please.”

The woman just tilted her head.  “I don’t even know who you are.”

Konstancja was awake when he came home.

“My,” she said.  “Tomek, what were you doing out?”

Tomek looked at her and shrugged.  Konstancja looked beautiful tonight; her hair was mussed and in the halflight she looked like a silent film star.  Tomek was unsettled to realize that she was a woman, not only his sister.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Konstancja pressed, laughing.

“No,” said Tomek.

“But you were seeing a girl, weren’t you?”

Tomek paused.  “Yes.”

“Oh, good.” Konstancja laughed.  “I was with a man, you know.  He says that when his business is finished here he’ll take me with him.” She sighed almost ruefully.  “We’re in love.”

“That must be…nice.”

“It isn’t, but it’s better than anything else.”

Tomek shrugged.  Konstancja ruffled his hair as if he was a child again.

“You’re a good boy,” she said suddenly.  “You’ll grow up to be a good man, won’t you?”

“I’m already a man,” said Tomek.

She kissed his forehead.  “Then stay good.”

“Of course I will,” he said, but Tomek thought about the ash he was always scrubbing out of the creases in his flesh.

Tomek worked too slowly the next day.  Waclaw yelled at him three times, until Tomek’s father told him it was enough.  Fear and unknowing kept Tomek’s attention.  Nothing he was asked to do seemed important by comparison.  Probably the woman was dead by now, but there was a part of him that doubted it.  To survive so much only to die afterwards was ridiculous.  The world might be cruel, but Tomek could not bear for it to be ridiculous.

At dinner he took extra food and put it in his pockets, and at night he filled a canteen with water and went out again to her little copse of trees.

The woman wasn’t naked anymore.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing to the man’s shirt that hung down to her thighs.

The woman plucked at the stained cloth.  “It doesn’t matter.”

“I brought you some water,” said Tomek.  “I brought you some food.”

She shrugged.  “I don’t need anything.” She sketched patterns into the dirt instead of looking at him.

“You shouldn’t stay here.  The soldiers will kill you if they find you.”

She laughed a little bit.  “The soldiers are why I’m staying.” She wiped out her drawings and started new ones.  “They won’t kill me.  They won’t find me.”

Tomek put the food and the canteen down.  “I’ll leave these for you,” he said.  “If you change your mind about wanting them.”

She looked up at him with her wolf eyes.

“Before you had the ovens,” she said, “what did you do with the bodies?”

Tomek was quiet.  “We buried them,” he said finally.

“Where?”

He pointed to the fields past the ovens.  “There.  Grass grows over them now, but you’ll be able to tell.”

She nodded and turned her attention back to her drawings.              “Why?” Tomek asked.  “Why does that matter?”

She sketched a long line like a river, and for a moment Tomek thought she was looking at a map.  He took a step closer to her, and she scuffed it out.

“You’re not so bad,” she offered.  Tomek reached out his hand, to touch her and perhaps to make her understand, or perhaps only to see if she was real, but she brushed his touch away.  Her skin was as cold as the air.

Konstancja would not stop singing.  At first her family teased her about it, then they grew annoyed, but her happiness remained, a delicate bird that Tomek was afraid might escape if they left the door to its cage open.

“We’ll leave soon,” she whispered to Tomek.  “I will miss you, and I will miss everyone else, but I am so happy to leave.”

Tomek wished that her lightness could carry him away, but the thought of the girl in the woods was too heavy for him to escape.

By the third day, Tomek was back to working as strongly as before.  Even Waclaw could find no fault with him.  Each day he did not visit the woman in the woods, it eased his heart to imagine that she had fled. But each night he returned, she was there.

One night, she asked his name.

“Tomasz,” he said.  After a moment, “Tomek.  No one calls me Tomasz.”

She made a purring sound low in her throat.

“It is a good name,” she decided.  “Tomek, can I trust you?”

“I haven’t told anyone about you yet.” He didn’t mean to say ‘yet,’ but the word came out of his mouth unbidden.  Who was there to tell?

She waved his words away.  “I do not mean about such things as that.  If I tell you to do something, will you do it?”

Tomek looked down at his feet.  “Perhaps.”

“If I told you to come and see me on a certain night, would you?”

Tomek nodded.

“Then when the moon is full,” she said.

So she was a witch.  Though Tomek had suspected it, the admission was difficult to hear.

“I would like you to see us rise,” she said.  “I would like for you to not be hurt.”

A tiny part of Tomek’s heart died as he realized he would have to betray her.

His father made him tell the story twice over their lunch, constantly looking about them to see that no one was watching.

“You have helped one of them to escape,” his father said at last.  “If the soldiers find out.”

“She isn’t one of them,” said Tomek.  “She might have been, once.  Now she is a witch, or a dead thing.” He did not have the vocabulary to describe her, to explain her cold touch and her contempt for food and the way her body had not burned.

“Of course it would have burned,” said Tomek’s father.  “She must have escaped from the pens and hidden in the ash.  You were a fool to believe her.  You were a fool to carry her out.”

Tomek’s father hadn’t seen.  He couldn’t know.

“You will take me there tonight,” said his father.  “We will fix this problem.” His face was small and tense, and suddenly Tomek was desperate to apologize.  The words would not come.  He did not know what else he could have done.

Sneaking out with his father was different.  His father was small, like his son, but to Tomek every step his father took was deafening.

His father was also cautious, as cautious as Tomek had been the first night–a caution he had dropped with time, as he had realized that the soldiers were not omniscient.

When they got to the woods, the woman was not there.  Nor were the small piles of food, which until now had gone untouched even by the insects.  Only the canteen was still there, half-covered in underbrush as though she had kicked it out of her sight.  His father did not see the canteen; Tomek did not point it out.  He did not want to get in trouble for stealing, too.

“Have you lied to me?” Tomek’s father asked.

Tomek swallowed.  “No.”

“Have you lied to me?” His father repeated, his voice clear and even and terrifying.

“No,” said Tomek.  They were so loud in the night of the woods.

“Then we will go home,” said his father.  “The woman has fled.  We will never speak of her again.”

The full moon came and went.  Tomek did not go to meet the woman in the woods.

A month passed, terrible in the quiet way that things had been terrible ever since the soldiers came.  They were putting more and more people in the pens, and by virtue of their number their noise was impossible to ignore.  Tomek felt sick every time he passed them, but less sick working in the ash.  He could pretend, very hard, that the two things were not related.

Konstancja came and went at night, and it seemed that Tomek was the only one who knew why, though her joy was obvious to everyone.  Spring was still so far away.

Tomek watched the phases of the moon, though he pretended to himself that he did not.  When the full moon came again he went back to the woods.  Perhaps he could bring the canteen home.  It felt good to disobey the soldiers, to prove that their curfews did not have to mean anything to him.  Tomek imagined that the euphoria of disobedience was part of what it meant to be a man.

She was there when he returned, half hidden in the underbrush.

“You are late,” she said.

Tomek was not surprised to see her.  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and realized that he was.

She shook her head.  “Let me touch your hand.”

He hesitated only a moment before holding it out.  She was a witch, or a ghost, or a creature of some kind, yet he did not fear her as he had always imagined he would fear a monster.

Her skin was so cold.

“I need some of your blood,” she said.

Tomek snapped his hand back.

“Please,” she said.  “I need the blood of the living, too.” She looked at him.  Tomek knew that if he gave her his blood, what happened next would be terrible.

“Why?” he asked.

She did not have her wolf eyes this night.  There was something else there, from which he could no more turn away than he could make the moon go dark.

“I am going to make the soldiers go away,” she said.

Tomek held out his hand.  She cut him with a penknife.  The dull blade did not easily pierce his skin, and when she finished the wound was shallow.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, as she held his canteen under his palm to catch the blood.

“Mix it with the blood of the dead,” she said.  They stood together, unmoving, as blood dripped from Tomek’s hand.

“Are you going to kill the soldiers?” asked Tomek.

The woman smiled.  “To a man.”

Tomek waited three days.  He knew it was foolish to expect an explosion, but it was what he wanted:  the soldiers’ barracks to go up in a gout of flame, noise louder than thunder, the earth to shake.  He wanted the pens swallowed whole, so that everyone could go back to the way things were before.

There was not an explosion, but the earth moved.  Tomek was sleeping, and did not know until it was too late.  His father woke him with his sisters, yelling things at them that did not make sense.  Tomek pulled on his coat.

Something was happening.  He had helped to bring it about.

His family went out into the street, where their neighbors ran in different directions.  Only when he was outside did Tomek realize that Konstancja, his singing bird of a sister, was not with them.  For a moment he hoped she was with her beau, that he could protect her, but it seemed to him that no one could be safe against the woman from the oven.

“What’s going on?” he yelled to his father.  His voice was lost in the voices of everyone else; there had never been such an unquiet night.

“What’s going on?” he yelled again.  People were running towards the woods, towards the fields–everywhere but towards the barracks and the pens.

Tomek pulled away from his father, out of the hands of his clinging sisters, and ran the way that no one else was running.  His father yelled something to him.  Amidst the tumult Tomek recognized his voice and could not make out the words.

He did not make it as far as the soldiers’ barracks.  The woman stopped him.  She was naked again, but Tomek had no mind to spare for the sight of her body, full and firm where before it had been gaunt and grey.  She had soldiers of her own behind her.  They were naked too, not only of clothes.  Many of them were missing layers of flesh, and even layers of muscle, so that in some places bone gleamed in the moonlight.  Tomek stopped at the sight of them, but the woman kept walking forward.  She touched her cold hand to his face.

“My army,” she said, sweeping a hand back at the silent troops behind her.  Many of them were children and women.  Scraps of clothing still hung from a few of their putrid bodies.

Tomek let out a breath of despair.  “The mass graves,” he whispered.

The woman smiled.  “They are empty.”

“And the soldiers?”

“They are dead.”

Tomek closed his eyes for a moment, then gathered his courage and looked her in the eye.  “Then you are finished here.”

“We are not.”

She did not say it cruelly, nor with any hint of apology.  It was only a fact to her.

Tomek was afraid.

The dead who were her army and entourage closed around her like a fist, and they touched Tomek with their hands of bone and muscle and the dregs of flesh.  The woman pressed her thumb against his forehead, leaving a wet smear of the blood of the dead.

“Don’t touch me!” yelled Tomek.  “You did this!  You did this!  Let me go!”

The woman shook her head.

“You helped me,” she said.  “When no one else did, you helped me.  But you did not save anyone else.” She tilted her chin up.  “All those screams from the pens, and did you even try?”

There were tears on Tomek’s face.  “My family,” he said.  “Please.  My family.”

“My family,” the woman replied.  “My everyone.” She gestured to her troops with one hand, and they shambled forward at her command, towards Tomek’s village.

“No!” he yelled.  “Stop it!  STOP IT!”

But the dead, if they could hear him, paid Tomek no mind.  Those who had brushed against him took hold of his arms and body, and the rest moved on.  Tomek fought them, sickened when their flesh slid off their bodies at his touch, when he snapped dry bones in his struggle to escape, but they were many and he was one.

“Please,” he called after the woman.  “Please!”

She did not turn around.

The dead held him for hours, halfway between the burning barracks and his village.  Their stench was overpowering, and Tomek took in great gulps of it as he fought them and panted for air.

In time, the village burned.  The smoke was thick with smells that were like the ovens, and smells that were nothing like the ovens, and Tomek vomited down the front of his shirt.

He fought with the dead, and cursed them, and pleaded with them, but it did not matter.

Eventually, the sun rose, and beneath its rays the dead fell.  They were only the dead again, no longer an army.  The village was littered with them, and with the torn corpses of others.  He saw Waclaw among them, or parts of Waclaw, and only one of his sisters.  Many of the corpses were so ruined that Tomek could not make out their faces.  He realized that if he went into the woods and out into the fields where his people had fled, there would be more.  Only the pens were free from death.  Tomek ventured into them the first time, and he wondered how anyone as emaciated as those people had found the energy to flee.  The dead may have let them escape, but the people from the pens would never make it.

Until the sun was at its highest, Tomek searched for anyone alive, anything that moved.  There was nothing:  only bodies, only death, and already the smell of rot.  He could not leave so many corpses bare against the sunlight.  Already the air was full of flies.

Tomek looked at the pockets of ash between his fingers.  Finally he went and lit the ovens.

The post PseudoPod 567: Passover appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Steve Rasnic Tem
• Narrators : Alasdair Stuart, Brian Lieberman, Setsu Uzume and Daniel Braum
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Halloween Street” was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1999 and was nominated for both a Stoker and an International Horror Guild award. “Tricks” “Butcher Paper” and “Masks of Me” were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1999 as part of “Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street”. “Halloween Street” was reprinted in Steve’s collection Celestial Inventories.

This Flash on the Borderlands is a set of stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, all set on Halloween Street.

 

“Halloween Street” is narrated by Alasdair Stuart.

“Masks of Me” is narrated by Daniel Braum.

“Butcher Paper” is narrated by Setsu Uzume.

“Tricks” is narrated by Brian Lieberman.

The music accompanying the Halloween Parade is “Creeper” from the album “Necrophiliac Among the Living Dead” by Terrortron, a side project of Anders Manga.

 

The post PseudoPod 566: Flash On The Borderlands XL: Halloween Street appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Angela Slatter
• Narrator : Victoria Winnick
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Cuckoo” originally appeared in A Killer Among Demons, Craig Bezant (ed.) Dark Prints Press, May 2013. It was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2014, Paula Guran (ed.), Prime Books.

Violence against children

Cuckoo by Angela Slatter

The child was dead by the time I found her, but she suited my purposes perfectly. 

Tiny delicate skin suit, meat sack, air thief. 

The flesh was still warm, which is best—too hard to shrug on something in full rigor—and I crammed my bulk into the small body much as one might climb into a box or trunk to hide. A fold here, a dislocation there, a twinge of discomfort and curses when something tore, stretched just too far. 

The rent was in the webbing of the right hand. Only a little rip, no matter. The sinister manus was my favoured choice of weapon anyway. I sat up, rolled my new shoulders—gently, carefully—then stood, rocking back slightly on legs too tender, too young to support my leviathan weight. I took a step, felt the world tilt, caught my balance before I fell and risked another tear; looked down at the single pink shoe, with its bows and glitter detail; took in the strange white cat face that ran around the hem of the pink and white dress; rubbed my miniature fingers against the dried brown stains that blotched the insides of my thighs. 

The child had died hard. 

The sliver of me that retained empathy ached, just a bit. But I could smell the scent of the one who’d done this and I would follow that scent. The hunt was on, my blood was up. Time was of the essence—my presence will speed decay. I pitched my head up so my nostrils caught the evening breeze and breathed deeply, filling my borrowed lungs, so the memory would remain. 

Again, I took a step, more, all steady. 

Determined. 

Forward.

The post PseudoPod 565: Cuckoo appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Garrett Cook
• Narrator : The Word Whore
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Hello, Handsome” was originally published in Giallo Fantistique in 2015. This was a great anthology edited by Ross E. Lockhart and released by Word Horde, and worth checking out if you’re a fan of Giallo, or if you want some nice surreal stories by folks like Orrin Grey and John Langan.

MUSIC USED – This week’s music is from “Orgy of the Vampires” by TERRORTRON: a posthumous electronic orb that splatters the ears of the living with a flood of brain-washing sound waves. This is a side project of Anders Manga which involves scoring cult horror movies you’ve never seen. Pray that you only get to hear them.

 

 

Our sisters and us we whisper beneath the glass. There are so many of them, in and out, stopping to look at the case, shaking their heads and walking. Some of them hear. Some of them bend an ear or take a closer look. Some of them we reject. We are perfect and thus, we are vain. A gangly thing with a pockmarked face wants to touch us, wants to bring us home, but we hiss and I know he hears us hiss. So he keeps walking. The girl behind the counter, she looks sad, robbed of her commission. Callous bitch. Then we see him, then we smell him, the right one. We coo to him inaudibly soft but we know that he can hear it. His face is weathered some but not displeasing, unblemished, not browned by the sun but age and a great deal of smiling. He looks smart in his grey hat and his raincoat, so very smart. The sort of man who would shop at a store like this one, where the finest is sold to the finest. The finest, that’s the sort. We cannot help but notice his hands. It is in our nature to notice someone’s hands of course. The hands are strong, the fingers slim and exquisite. His wrists are slender, the bones of his knuckles hard. These are not the beaten hands of a man his age. These are not the hands of a working man but nonetheless hands with purpose. I barely need to let him know I’m here or to talk over our sisters. He is deep but is wonderfully legible. Wonderfully, wonderfully legible. He approaches the salesgirl and points into the case. “I’d like to see that pair.” Oh, yes, oh yes, you would. You would like to get to know us and let us know you. You would like to take us home. There are stories we read in the people that come and go about the things that happen when we’re taken home, the exquisite warm sensations, the adventure and delight. Some of his secrets are legible but there is so much more to know.

The post PseudoPod 564: Hello, Handsome appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Cassandra Khaw, Chris Kuriata and Getty Hesse
• Narrators : Maui Threv, Mae Zarris-Heaney and John Bell
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

Kiss, Don’t Tell is a reprint

Shed Skin is a PseudoPod Original. This story is the culmination of Getty’s attempts to adequately explore the experience of depression.

The Corpse Child is a PseudoPod Original

Kiss, Don’t Tell by Cassandra Khaw

You never told me she’d be so human, so sweet. Marzipan bones and caramel hair, latte skin stretched taut over a face still new to wanting. Just a mouthful, really, a morsel, her eyes brittle as she watches us flit by, heartbeats sliding between the ribs of time.

In Europe, no one believes in kismet, but who needs faith to author fact?

Later, you joke about serendipity. I nod in silence, my fingers still glazed with her cells and her atoms, the taste of her bitter with ghosts of Sunday afternoon pasts. How many street corners have you kissed on? How many does she remember? How many times has she sat coiled by her phone, waiting, waiting, thumbing through pictures of you together, a patchwork of possibilities that should have spelled out a future?

I don’t sleep that night. Instead, I sit and watch the Parisian skyline, dreaming of penanggalans in waltz.

Pontianak, huli jing, rakshaka. You called me from a country of monsters, serpent-haired, dagger-teethed, skin hot as kiamat. Nothing like her, nothing like the women that slither through London, Berlin, Paris; their bones Abrahamic, their minds agnostic, mouths full with the gospel of Apple. Was it the novelty that enticed you, or the reflection of teeth? Because I can smell it on you, your flesh, your smile; ocean salt, hydra blood, a thousand ancient wars in a thousand new molecules. We’re monsters, you and I.

But her?

I can tell she’s a good girl, always has been, always will be, even though her dreams cup a fading memory of black leather and black lashes, whiplash-promises on her skin. Not a monster, even though she’s sometimes pretends, armoring herself with lipgloss and suits cut sharp as suicide.

Delicious, darling.

Langsuir, jiangshi, ngu tinh. I pull myself onto the window sill, feel cartilage bulge and vertebrae give. The air burns cold. Egui, preta, desire, hunger. My blood is singing, so loud that it amazes that you can sleep. I wonder what you’d say if you woke and found me framed in the moonlight, flesh and bone turned protean, amoebic.

I wonder what you’d think if you saw my wings: knucklebones strung together like rosaries, membranous skin, tendons to tether. Nothing like your angels, darling. Nothing so sweet.

I wonder what you’d do if I told you I’d chased her scent across the city, her a ghost, me a knot of entrails and superstition, invisible to rational men. Because under her skin, I tasted the salt of your old desires, coiling with hers, an ouroboros of mouth and grasping hands and moans. And nothing, darling, displeases me more.

I wonder, I wonder.

Would you beg me to stop, darling? As I stole across the skyline of her sleeping body, over hip and thigh and sternum, to stop a breath from her mouth, would you shout out no?

I imagine not. Women break like surf on the hearts of men, foam and whispers, frothing to nothing. You remember us for as long as we are there, stretched like cats in your beds, our flesh warm, our arms patient. No more, no less. And when we are gone, you write us into an inventory of conquests. Another notch, another monster taken by the smoke in your smile, the teeth in your eyes.

Darling, can I tell you a secret?

It would be so easy. To sip chi from her lips, to empty her like a broken heart, to leave her skin and only skin, like gauze or yesterday’s drunken lovemaking. Until all that is left but the instinct to walk, to breathe, to hold on, hold on, hold on.

But should I?

All monsters must eat, whether they are men or myth, fabrications of fear or consequences of nurture. We find our prey where we may. You in the unguarded, I in the broken, the worn-down, the street-side prayer, the alleyway fighter. But if you still cared, still held her wellbeing suspended like a prize in your consciousness, I might consider mercy.

Maybe.

If you were awake, darling, if you were standing framed in the moonlight, your lips stitched shut with veins, your eyes closed with red string, I would come to your ears and whisper, “What do you think will happen next?”

Will I write my hurts into doa selamats, a hundred invocations against a thousand new anguishes? Will I graze my tongue across hers, calling the monsters in her blood. Douen, Jumbie, Loogaroo. Will I tell them to keep her safe, keep her safe from men who only have eyes for themselves, who keep their hearts locked behind doors while they hold out their hands for yours?

Or will I dig through spine and brain, guzze blood and lymph? Will I gorge myself on lung fibrous and vein intricate, on intestines still warm with animal heat, on a brain still shuddering with a memory of you? Darling, do you see me keeping the best parts of her for myself, those things that made you love her for more years than you’ve known I? Or do you see it pulped into energy, into fuel for flight, inconsequential as the names of all the women you never loved, only lusted for?

One wonders, but it does not matter. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t find me slathered in gore, throat bulging, belly heavy with meat and muscle. Instead, you will see me as you’ve always seen me, a fascination, a novelty, a hope.

When we kiss, when we trade affection like tokens of power, it’s possible that she will just be awaking, lungs inflamed with myth, and confused, move to sit at her parents’ balustrade, wondering why she had ever wasted time on you at all. Tomorrow, it’s possible too that her parents might awake and find her ribs in her bed, cracked open for marrow, licked completely clean, her finger-bones rattling like dice in her ribs. Tomorrow, they might scream and all of Paris will wake, wondering, wondering how this disaster came to be.

Who knows? You’ll never ask, and I’ll never tell.

Shed Skin by Getty Hesse

It has been six days since the fourteen of us sloughed off our skin. We have abandoned distinctions between adult and adolescent, between caretaker and patient. Our corded muscles glimmer under the fluorescent lights. Blood vessels snake our bodies. Bones peek out. We should feel pain, the sting of the air against our flesh, but we don’t. Without the isolation of our skin we should be vulnerable to infection, and yet we are not. We do not hunger; we do not thirst.

We finger under each others’ muscles and blood vessels. We tongue them. We enter each other in every possible way until I cannot tell my appendages from any of the others’, until the others cannot tell their own appendages from mine. The boundaries of our bodies seem to shrivel away.

Before, those of us who were adolescents couldn’t leave until we were deemed not a threat to ourselves or others. But this little world had still been permeable. Parents would visit and call. The staff would leave after their shifts or come in to take over. New patients would be admitted. Old patients were discharged. Carts carrying trays of food would be brought in three times a day and taken out again with the remains.

Now, the one door out is locked, even to those who were once adults. The keys don’t work. No one comes in; we hear nothing from the other side of the door. The faucets no longer spout water. The phone does not even produce static. The windows, through which we once caught our only glimpses of the city outside, of ambulances and helicopters, are fogged to opacity. The gnashing of drills and jackhammers that spilled from one of the upper floors no longer jolts us awake in the morning, no longer deafens us. Not that we sleep anymore, or struggle hearing.

It is as if nothing exists outside our confines. Not that we mind. Our world, little though it is, is big enough for us.

We snap veins and arteries and muscles but they don’t hurt and they heal within moments. We did it by accident, at first, and then we did it for fun. We saw how much we could break without it being permanent.

On the third day we picked Latisha apart, carefully, unthreading her arteries and veins and capillaries from each other and from her tissue, separating the tendons of muscle and the bones, laying the organs out over the floor of the hall. I held her still-beating heart, the veins and arteries neatly snipped off by scissors from the front desk, and felt the life of it in my hand. Blood pooled across the floor, through open doors to what were once our bedrooms. The sticky warmth of it lapped against our feet.

As we watched, Latisha’s body stitched itself together, though the assorted parts seemed static. We would see her leg rebuilt, and have no recollection of how it occurred. We sifted through our memories and knew that time had passed and matter moved but could not make the two cohere, could not attribute one to the other.

When she was whole again she was laughing in ecstasy.

“What was it like?” Genevieve asked.

“It felt like being laid bare before God.”

I think I was a patient here, an adolescent, but I cannot remember anymore. I remember singing in the shower and on the toilet, learning to meditate, learning yoga, whispering to others about things that were not supposed to be spoken. I remember the ravening hollow, the ulcer through which my soul bled out like stomach acid, which is why I think I was one of the adolescents, but perhaps some of the adults had the same. Perhaps I was an adult who taught children how to deal with their hollows because I had learned how to deal with my own.

Of the other thirteen, I cannot remember who was a teen and who was an adult. It doesn’t matter, anyway. We are all the same now, separated only by names and space.

“Do you remember the hollow?” I ask.

“The hollow?” The nook where Genevieve’s nose once was glistens. We are lying upon one of the couches in the central room, her face nuzzled up against mine. I stick my tongue into the nook and lick the walls inside. She giggles.

As she licks inside the nook where my nose once was, I struggle to describe the hollow. “The feeling… that you can’t reach anyone else. That you can touch them, be inside them, speak to them, yet they’re too far away. That you’re all alone and always will be.”

“Oh,” Genevieve says. Her tongue recedes back into her mouth. She shivers.

“I remember that,” Jonathan says. He and José are making love, tangled over the arms of one of the chairs.

Everyone remembers, all fourteen of us.

When I first realized my hollow had vanished, my freshly shed skin was lying tattered on the floor before me. Air kissed my veins, arteries, muscles, flesh, as it might have before through a scrape or a cut. But I felt no pain. I felt only ecstasy, and something where once the nothing tormented me.

“Do you feel that?” I cried. I picked up my skin, tied it around my neck. I danced, laughing, and it billowed around me. “Do you feel that?”

Everyone stared, uncomprehending, at the skins fallen before them, their flesh glimmering with fresh freedom. Slowly, each of them smiled.

“Yes,” murmured Genevieve, and she tilted her head back and laughed in ecstasy. I kissed her brow, and kissed it and kissed it, and embraced her and felt her hot flesh against mine. She tied her skin about her neck and we danced, and the others followed suit. We whirled about each other in jubilant chaos and kissed each other on the forehead, lips, shoulder, chest; we touched each other in every way we could.

We lie about the floor and on the couch, panting, in a momentary lull. I’m leaning against the wall. Genevieve’s head is in my lap. I stroke the top of her head, where once there was scalp and hair. I think the hair was long and dark and curly, but my memory is vague and that hair might have belonged to someone else.

Genevieve extends her leg up to Latisha on the edge of the couch, and Latisha begins to suck Genevieve’s toes, tonguing the strips of muscle. I watch as José tickles Jonathan’s flaccid penis with his tongue.

I look down at the beautiful strips of muscle that extend from Genevieve’s skull to grip her jaw. “Why do you think this happened to us?” I ask.

She gazes up at me. She strokes my face. “God,” she says. “Or as good as. Only a perfect being could create such a perfect existence.”

Sometimes, I wonder what exists now outside the confines of our little world. Is our newfound heaven a miniature of a much larger miracle? Has the larger universe ceased to exist, replaced only by a nothing impossible to imagine? Or has the world continued on as it always has, with the ravening hollows at the core of every skin-constrained soul?

I wonder if the people outside are trying to get into our ward, or if they see it’s closed off but don’t try to enter for some reason beyond their grasp, or if they can’t see it, or if it’s gone. It’s possible they’re watching everything we’re doing, through windows we can’t see, that we’re some sort of science experiment or quarantine. I wonder, would others see us and know we’re blessed, or would they think us cursed?

I can’t remember names anymore, or genders. Almost without realizing it, I have stopped thinking of anyone as anything but a “they.” The concepts themselves, names and genders, corrode.

We don’t remember where one of us once ended and the others began. Our veins and arteries all bleed into each other, bones fuse, the borders of our minds dissolve until our thoughts do not come from one of us or another but from us all. Our many eyes take in the fractured all-sided view of our perfect, red, glistening bulb of a body, the many protruding limbs corded in veins and muscles.

We throw ourselves against the door, we tear at it, we smash our elbows and arms and heads against the black windows, bones breaking, skulls caving in, only to reassemble. If the people outside are still constricted in their skins, separated no matter how they try to fuse together, we want to save them, bring them into our amoebic, painless mass. If the people have formed their own amorphous multi-self, then we want to join them. Either way, it would be so beautiful, to have every human in the world together at last, to be many in one, for pain and loneliness to vanish.

The people outside could be gone, of course, in which case we could be at peace in our current body. We would mourn them, the humans who never experienced a life without pain, who were disconnected from all other beings from the snipping of their umbilical cords to the cessation of their senses. But the mourning would not last long, and would be followed by an eternity of joy.

We beat against the door and the windows, to no avail. We start beating against the walls, trying to find someplace, anyplace weak enough to cave in. Finally we collapse on the floor. Our bulbous body alters to accommodate it.

We cry for the possibility of people still tortured by hollows, still chained within the confines of the self. Our tears slip down twenty-eight cheeks of red muscle and veins. Some of the tears fall into open air, onto the tile floor. Others fall within our body, nestle upon hearts and lungs, trickle down the outer curves of arteries.

We stop crying after a while and get up, our body changing shape once again. We cannot at this moment save those outside, if they still need saving, if they still exist. But we can wait. We can love ourselves. We can hope that the door will eventually open, or a wall or window will become breakable once more.

We beat again against the walls, windows, door. But we do this without desperation. We smile with our fourteen mouths. We may break through, or we may not.

We are truly together, as one. That is what matters. We love ourselves. We will never be alone. We remember the ghost of pain but it no longer has any force. It is something we as good as never had.

The Corpse Child By Chris Kuriata

Along the shores of Shipman’s Corner, a macabre belief quickly gained currency, which claimed most fatal childhood illnesses (scarlet fever, measles) could be cured by having the infected party sleep over the corpse of a young child.

The origin of this belief remains undiscovered. Condemned from the pulpit, the treatment was rarely applied. According to the tales, the corpse child must not have died from illness. Only a healthy body stopped by unnatural means (crushed in an avalanche of hay bales, say, or kicked in the head by an ornery horse) would do. Accident-made bodies became highly valued, meaning patients of “the corpse treatment” came exclusively from families of means.

“Momma, am I dreaming? Is that a scarecrow the servants are placing beneath my bed?”

“Lie back and go to sleep, my darling. In the morning, you will be made strong again.”

“Am I to share my room with a strange corpse?”

“Shhh… there is nothing to fear. He is where you cannot even see him.”

Two servants slid the corpse child into place before hurrying the young boy’s parents out of the room. Once the bedroom door was sealed, everyone removed the cloth masks covering their mouths. With heavy hearts, the young boy’s parents retired to their own chamber, praying for the blasphemous (and expensive) treatment to cleanse the threatening red boils sprouting across their beloved son’s tiny body.

The feverish boy awoke in the middle of the night, drawn back to consciousness by the stirrings beneath his mattress. Small fingers raked across the wooden support beams, echoing in the empty room like someone prematurely buried scratching the lid of their coffin.

“It is too cold down here,” a hollow voice whispered from under the bed. “Let us switch places.”

“I do not think that is a good idea.”

“Just for an hour, so I may warm up.”

“If I lie under the bed, the draught will only make me sicker.”

“Please, you can’t imagine how wet and chilled I am.”

“Forgive my thoughtlessness. I will call for the servants and they will bring you blankets.”

The corpse child sighed, making the water in his lungs bubble. “You are very wise, boy. I was actually trying to trick you.”

“Trick me?”

“Oh, yes. If you had switched places with me, I wouldn’t have traded back. In the morning, when your parents unsealed the room, I would have leapt up with my arms spread wide, shouting, ‘Momma! Poppa! I’m cured!’ They would have hugged me, tears streaming down their cheeks. You would have tried to call out from under the bed, but your sick tongue would’ve swollen up like a black eel and left you unable to speak. You would only be able to bray like a donkey, ‘Eee orr, eee orr!’ Believing you to be me, the servants would ram hooks into your legs and drag you outside to the pyre and set you aflame. Did you know a person’s head is too dense to burn? The servants would use a big rock to smash your skull into smaller pieces. And all the while, I would sit at the breakfast table, listening to you go up in smoke.”

This admission horrified the boy. “That is terrible. Shame on you for trying to trick me.”

“You can’t blame me for wanting to avoid such an awful fate myself. I may be dead but I do not wish to burn.”

The boy understood. He felt sympathy for the corpse child, who, after all, was going to make him well again. “Listen to me, when morning comes, I will insist Mother and Father not burn you.”

“That is very kind, but I shouldn’t want you to worry about my disposal.”

“I insist. Tell me what you would prefer.”

The corpse child thought hard. “Well, I have always been fond of the funny paintings in the museum; the look of agony on the faces of the condemned, the peasants tumbling beneath the swords of the King’s guard. When I was alive, it used to make me laugh to see the strokes of crimson paint gushing from swaddled babes in their mother’s arms. I think I should like to be buried on the grounds of the museum. They have a glorious courtyard where I will be able to hear the visitors laughing at the funny paintings. Such a reminder of joy will make my dark, lonely grave bearable.”

“It is settled. I promise, I will insist my parents not burn you but instead bury you at the museum.”

Moved by such a generous offer, the corpse child shook beneath the bed, making the caster wheels squeak. When he spoke next, he sounded as though he were holding back tears (though his speech impediment could also have been caused by lazy muscles in his dead throat). “You are very kind. So kind, I cannot hold my tongue. Though it would benefit me to keep quiet, I must warn you that you are in danger.”

“Danger? How?”

“Being wise people, your parents fully expect me to try and trick you into switching places. Come morning, they will assume the boy in the bed is not their son, but the skullduggerous corpse child attempting to take his place. Mark my words, whichever boy is lying on top of the bed will be seized by hooks and dragged outside and thrown in the fire and have his skull crushed so it will burn.”

“My parents will make no such mistake. Surely they will recognize me.”

“In the dim morning light? Why, the disciples could not recognize the resurrected Son that early in the morning. How will your parents recognize you?”

“I can easily prove who I am. I know the name of my young brother Jonathan, and our baby sister Rebecca. I know Mother is terrified of boat crossings. I know Father relies on me to wind his watch.”

“All trifle information I could have wheedled out of you while pretending to be your friend. You must believe me; under the bed is the only safe place. Come morning, your parents will destroy you.”

“I cannot believe my parents will be so blinded by suspicion they cannot tell the difference between their beloved son and a rotting corpse child. Your wretched stink alone makes evident who is who.”

“Please, you must let me help you.”

“No. I will stay on top of the bed and you will stay below. And you will be quiet, or else I will not tell my parents to bury you in the museum courtyard and you will be seized by hooks and thrown on the fire and have your skull crushed.”

Silence. Satisfied to have settled the matter, the boy turned over and sank his feverish cheek into the cool pillow, longing for the sweet relief of sleep to spread through his aching body.

He didn’t rest for long. Cold breath soon lashed the soles of his bare feet. The boy sat up, and through the murky blackness watched the corpse child pull himself over the foot of the bed, clinging to the sheets like a sailor hauling himself from the ocean. The corpse child’s fat, water logged lips pulled back in a snarl.

“This foolish conversation has gone on long enough. Get under the bed where it is safe, or else I will crawl under the covers and make you smell of rot and death. In the morning, your parents will be unable to tell the difference between the two of us and we will both be doomed.”

“I will not say another word to you. Goodnight.”

Growling like a trapped fox, the corpse child slipped deftly beneath the sheets and tunneled towards the boy. His cold, clammy hands seized the boy’s knees, and slowly dragged his dead weight over the boy’s body. Struggling to get away, the boy threw over the covers, only to find the corpse child’s twisted face resting on his chest. Their eyes locked.

The boy remained calm. His father once instructed him the most vulnerable part of a wild animal was their nose, so if he ever found himself face to face with a snarling beast, his best chance for survival was to aim for the snout. The boy raised his weakened hand and made a fist, but before he could strike, the corpse child grabbed him by the ears and forced their mouths together. Hot and cold noses mashed against one another as the corpse child breathed putrid gas from his abdomen down the boy’s throat. The boy gagged and retched. The two began to wrestle, each trying to toss the other over the side of the bed into the black ocean of the cold floor. The squeaking of the caster wheels echoed through the house.

First thing next morning, with the light still dim, the boy’s parents unsealed the room. They held their breath, fearing the worst—that the legends of the healing properties of child corpses were greatly exaggerated and their son’s bedroom would no longer be occupied by one corpse, but two.

The bed covers stirred, thrashing about like foam on an angry sea. The boy sprang forth, fully cured, his arms spread wide.

“Momma! Poppa!”

The relieved parents rushed to his bedside, wrapping their arms around him, ignoring the foul smell tainting his bed clothes.

“Our darling. Thank heavens you are well again.”

“Oh Mother, the corpse boy under the bed spoke to me in the night! He tried to trick me into switching places with him!”

“Yes, dear. We thought he might.”

“He told me you wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from your true son.”

“Oh dear heart, that was all wicked chicanery. Of course we know you’re our true son.”

The boy’s father signaled the two servants waiting in the doorway, each holding a sharp, metal hook which they thrust under the bed, piercing the legs of the corpse boy and dragging him out. The corpse boy made horrible noises, braying like a donkey, “Eee orr, eee orr!” The crackle of a roaring fire came through the open window, hungry for more fuel.

            “Wait!” the boy said. “This wicked corpse boy may have tried to trick me, but I made a promise. Even though he is a lesser being without honour, I intend to keep my vow.”

“I am pleased, son. A righteous man always honours his vows, even those made to dishonest beings who mean to betray him.”

“I promised the corpse boy I would implore you not to throw him on the fire, but instead grant him his burial wish.”

“And so we shall. Tell us what he desires.”

“He confessed to me feeling envious of our loving household; such a cautious Mother who protects her children from unnecessary sea crossings, and a wise Father who teaches the value of responsibility by entrusting me to wind his watch each day, and the delight of my younger brother Jonathan and my baby sister Rebecca.”

The boy’s parents couldn’t help but preen from the flattering words the corpse child had spoken of them in the night. “Yes, son, you have been blessed with a loving household. One can hardly fault the corpse boy for scheming to join us.”

“Indeed. As such, he told me he wishes to be buried feet down and head up on the hill overlooking our home, close enough where he can hear our evening laughter. It would please him greatly to be buried where he can keep watch over us, and perhaps, once a year, we will trek up the hill to visit his grave and give thanks to him for making this new day possible. Yes, I think he would like that very much. Such a reminder of joy will make his dark, lonely grave bearable.”

Once again, great happiness filled the family home. While the servants stuffed the corpse boy into a sack for transport to his final resting place, the cured boy dressed and wandered the manor house. Along the way, he emptied the last of the lake water from his lungs into a large potted plant, giggling when the putrid water wilted the healthy palm fronds. Soon, the smell of fresh breakfast filled the air, guiding him to the dining room, where brother and sister flanked his new seat at his new table.

The post PseudoPod 563: Flash On The Borderlands XXXIX: Teratology appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Nick Mamatas
• Narrators : Alasdair Stuart, Brian Lieberman, Tad Callin, Ben Phillips, Scott Campbell, Graeme Dunlop, Moaner T. Lawrence, Dagny Paul and Kaz
• Host : Alex Hofelich
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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PseudoPod 562: A Howling Dog is a PseudoPod original.

Consider this Wikipedia article while listening to this story.

Check out PAPERBACKS FROM HELL by Grady Hendrix. Listen to the interview on the Know Fear Podcast with Grady and Will Erikson about the book and the paperback boom of the 70’s and 80’s.

A Howling Dog by Nick Mamatas

The app, and associated website, had another name, but it was most appropriate to think of it as Cranki.ly.  It was for neighbors to anonymously discuss neighborly things, but social media was as prone to Gresham’s Law as anything else—the bad conversations drove out the good ones.  It only took three months or so from initial launch for the posts to be all about suspicious dark-skinned men skulking around town “supposedly delivering the so-called mail”, the essential wrongness of mowing the lawn in one’s boxer shorts, and conspiracy theorizing about the next major ISIS attack hitting town… “because the Super Wal-Mart, one of the really nice ones, is just five miles down on Route 5. It’s a juicy target for Jihadis.”

A juicy target, indeed.

The post that started all the real problems in Cranki.ly’s Alameda County Zone 4 was this one, posted one afternoon just a week ago:

Hey Neighbors,

I’ve been hearing a dog howl/cry at all hours from my apartment close to the corner of Russell and Schiffer. I was wondering if anyone knew who the dog belonged too… It breaks my heart and I’m wondering if the owner knows about it. One of the dogs I fostered a few years back had severe separation anxiety and would howl for most of the time when I left for work and I didn’t know about it until a neighbor alerted me, at which point, I was able to work on the separation anxiety with her.

Any leads appreciated. Thanks!

On the surface, a perfectly ordinary post. An especially pleasant one for Cranki.ly, actually despite the specter of an ever-howling dog. The post garnered no comments though, for the reason you have surely already guessed—nobody else had heard the dog. Certainly not at all hours. The best thing to do in such a case is just not respond at all. There are plenty of other threads to read.

Why explain, why ask, why encourage further discussion?

Three days later, the poster issued a follow-up.

Russell and Schiffer Residents,

Hello again! I am still hearing a dog howl and whine, day and night, every day, and every night. It is definitely coming from 2774 Schiffer. Please, take care of your dog!   If you live in 2774 Schiffer, you have a responsibility to call your landlord or management company, or talk to your neighbor about how he or she (but let’s be honest, probably a he!) cares for a companion animal. I am beginning to wonder if the issue is actual abuse rather than just neglect and separation anxiety.

I do not want to have to call the city, as too often neglected animals are brought to shelter where they are quickly euthanized.

And then the howling will never stop!

A much more off-putting message. Why would anyone respond to that? There was no dog at all. The poster was obviously dealing with some sort of mental issue, or was trolling. Either way, nobody living in 2774 Schiffer—a squat six-unit apartment building of one-bedroom apartments—would have any call to extend the thread. And yet, someone did.

Actually, by definition the howling would stop then, no?

The strict discipline shown by the Cranki.ly regulars fractured then.  Tasteless. was upvoted two dozen times. While Really funny, buddy. A total howler. was buried under a mountain of downvotes. One individual even tried to talk sense to the OP.

I live on the corner of Russell and Schiffer, catty-corner from 2774. Full-time freelancer, work from home. I don’t wear earbuds or even watch TV, and I like to keep my windows open when I can because I love the fragrance of lilacs. (I have several large bushes in my yard.) Never heard a dog howl even once, much less “at all hours.”

Several other people acknowledged the truth—nobody had ever heard a dog anywhere in the vicinity, much less howling emanating from 2774 Schiffer, which was a residence with a draconian policy when it came to regulations and pet deposits for even mere cats—dogs were absolutely forbidden. The howling isn’t just non-existent, one poster commented, it’s impossible.

Which, was, of course, false. It’s not impossible for there to have been a dog in a building in which dogs are banned. And just because only one person could hear its howling doesn’t mean that the howling was a delusion. There could have been a conspiracy of silence around the dog, around its constant cries for attention and relief.  Indeed, all the comments responding to the original post could have been from one busy person, creating a narrative of tasteless rejoinders and cynicism from whole cloth just to further demoralize and upset the original poster.

For that matter, the initial post regarding the curious incident of a bark without a dog could have been an attempt at Internet virality. Creepypasta, as the kids say. Cranki.ly’s moderation policies leave something to be desired—anyone with an email address can post what they please so long as they eschew certain slurs. The only reason there’s little spam or true hatemongering on the site is that its user base of middle-class busybodies and PTA lifetime-members is of little interest to the broader online world. But what’s next? A report of a dog corpse surfacing in the soft dirt in the yard in front of the building after a week of heavy rains, or worse, bones found in the walls after 2774 Schiffer condo conversion? (Condo conversions being one of the perennial flamebait topics on Cranki.ly.) Or is it no dog at all, but instead some woman or child, gone feral and chained to a pipe near a rusty bucket of excrement, that had been howling all these days?

That “full-time freelance writer” was especially suspicious. Someone with an inclination toward fiction, and likely the impulse to procrastinate by goofing around on the Internet all day. Was all of Cranki.ly going to be written up in some obnoxious essay about group psychology, or urban legends? There was only one thing to do. Specifically, it was time to type

I hear it too.

And then press publish.

Another ten hours of silence on the thread, as if the neighborhood was holding its collective breath. And then a new party, or a new claim anyway, entered the thread.

I’m new to this website, but I heard from a friend about it and came to check what people in the Windham neighborhood are discussing. I thought this conversation was pretty interesting. I used to live in the building, years ago, and there was often a dog tied up outside at all times, in all weather. It’s mostly warm and sunny here in Northern California, but you know what I mean.

She wouldn’t actually howl or bark all the much, but I felt very sad whenever I saw the dog. One time I stood in the yard and I started howling, like that dog should have. I guess I was just trying to get some attention for the poor animal. Not one person even opened their blinds to look out the window and see what the ruckus was. It was a Sunday morning too, so people were home. I could see movement through the blinds in the windows. I really howled my head off!

Anyway, this was all more than twenty years ago, so that dog is probably long dead, but I just wanted to share the story as a way of reminding you all to be good to one another. Have a blessed day!

And then it was a war of all against all. Accusations flew—sockpuppets, tricks, spam, Russian hackers, hoaxing and punking, and repeated uploads of that now-ancient New Yorker cartoon panel featuring the adage “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

But I really do hear it too.  Someone kept trying.  Doesn’t anyone else hear it? I’m not the OP.

The poster went on:

This is insane. You’re all online all day long, and live within a mile of the place. Just walk outside. I live across the street; I  can hear it now. Meet me on the corner of Russell and Schiffer. I’ll be wearing a blue hat. I have a long beard and glasses. I’ll be the one with the iPhone in hand, listening to and recording the howling of the dog. I’m not the OP, this is not a joke! It’s noon now. I’ll step outside in ten minutes and stand on the corner until 12:30. You can walk a mile in less than twenty minutes if you’re reasonably healthy. Just come out and listen!

Perhaps some of the lurkers on the thread contemplated joining the man, but no active posters did. One response read

Let me guess—I walk all the way to Schiffer Street and you’re there with a gun to steal my iPhone.

A rejoinder:

Oh don’t be paranoid. It’s probably some dumb prank. They’ll have a dog ready to howl or even just a recording of one, and they’ll video the reactions of whoever is there for some sort of tedious “found footage” movie.

Then

I am the dog come visit meeeeeoooooooooh!

was the third response.

“Meeeeeoooooooooh!” reads to me much more like a cat than a dog, so clearly you are dumb enough to be a dog. Do us all a favor and stop howling all day, or start, so we know what’s what!

finished up the subthread.

Despite the claims explicit and implicit in the home page copy and related images, Cranki.ly was not successfully “bringing communities together.”  Nor was there very much “openness” and “honesty” created by the anonymity of the service. Not even when one Jack Reinhard, a long-time neighborhood resident, was hit by a car while standing right on Schiffer Street—a vehicle had jumped the curb, and sped off—nobody emerged from their homes to render aid. Nobody called 911. Reinhard had to do it himself, with his own broken arm. His blue hat fluttered away and landed on a Y-shaped tree branch half a block away. Someone took a photo of that and posted it on Cranki.ly.  Reinhard had no local visitors during his overnight hospital stay, and only contacted his sister, who lived hours away in Sacramento. It took a day and a night for the hat to fall from the branch, and that was thanks to a squirrel not part of our program.

Setting a grease fire in one of the first-floor apartments of 2774 Schiffer was no help either. Sure, Cranki.ly posters made comments—ooh, sirens!! was upvoted a dozen times—and in the morning the URL to the local newspaper’s story on the topic was also posted, but while the fire burned and emergency vehicles congregated, not one window opened, not one local Cranki.ly poster toddled outside to see what was going on. Certainly, nobody even recalled the thread about the ever-howling dog supposedly in residence so many had engaged with just five days prior.

A prod:

Did the firefighters find the dog?

The responses were not encouraging: that would have been a “grilled hot dog”, eh? said one poster, and another, perhaps attempting to lighten the mood, posted a photo of a dachshund puppy in a hot dog bun. Couldn’t hear the howling over the sirens, sorry (and also because I’m not off my medication and can’t hear imaginary dogs) read a third post.

Incorrigible, the lot of them, it seemed. Cranki.ly may have well benefitted from rules against anonymity, or at least from a mechanism that would compel posters to hold to a consistent identity, like most bulletin boards and Internet comments sections. The online world is full of trolls and griefers, but surely, people would be nice to their neighbors whom they already knew, or could potentially face in heated meatspace confrontations after mouthing off online, no?

Well, perhaps, after all, the answer is still, at least potentially, yes. Finally, someone put up a post worth reading, a simple message of compassion and kindness:

I think we may all be having a hard time lately. I know things have been rough for me. I’m not calling anyone out; I’m just saying how I’ve personally been feeling these past few days. I’m sorry if anything I’ve posted has annoyed or agitated anyone. I wish you all health and peace—I really mean it. I usually have a drink at Raleigh’s every night, same stool (right in front of the cash register) same time (7:30 pm). If anyone wants to come out and sidle up next to me, I’ll buy you a cocktail. All are welcome.

Eureka! Anonymity under pressure can lead to improvements in sociability and fellow-feeling among neighborhood residents. This calls for a refinement of our protocol. The next step is clear: to procure and torture a real dog, day and night. Or perhaps a child.

The post PseudoPod 562: A Howling Dog appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Joseph Cusumano
• Narrator : Cheyenne Wright
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 561: Better to Curse the Darkness than Light a Candle is a PseudoPod original.

Check out PAPERBACKS FROM HELL by Grady Hendrix. Listen to the interview on the Know Fear Podcast with Grady and Will Erikson about the book and the paperback boom of the 70’s and 80’s.

 

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Better to Curse the Darkness than Light a Candle by Joseph Cusumano

They mockingly call me “Diogenes,” believing my lantern is carried merely to illuminate my path each night through the dark streets of Philadelphia. Yet it is not an honest man for whom I search, but a scoundrel, a liar, an adulterer, a thief, a murderer – ideally someone who has been all of these – for I must find a soul darker than my own.

This quest resulted from an earlier and more innocent one, first undertaken while I was a young man blissfully wed to Patience, who brimmed with optimism over what heaven had apparently planned for us. Not content with the considerable success that I enjoyed as the proprietor of Silsbury Shipping Company, I sought more wealth, the respect of Philadelphia’s business and merchant class, and especially the adoration that Patience showered upon me with each step my growing business took. On the occasion of my boasting to her that I now employed upwards of fifty men who labored on my behalf, moving goods from our warehouses to multiple sites hundreds of miles west, she swelled with pride in my accomplishment and even her passions were aroused.

            My success was achieved before the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. When the canal first opened, there was no appreciable loss of business, merely a slowing in our rate of growth. However, by 1829, the volume of goods shipped through the canal at lower cost than any land route could hope to provide had created a disastrous effect on my personal economy and, to a lesser extent, on all of Philadelphia as well. Even the powerful textile manufacturers were adversely affected. If my business had suffered only a loss of revenue, not all would be lost, but I had taken substantial loans from banks to further my seemingly unending profits, loans based upon the value of my business and personal property, including our home. As the city’s fortunes declined, other borrowers faced the same issues as I, and the banks to which I was indebted ignored my entreaties to renegotiate the terms of the loans that might well be my ruin.

A man raised in a devout Calvinist community should never have resorted to what I did next, but had I not been taught that a man’s eternal fate could be ascertained by the material success and wealth he amassed on earth? If I lost everything, would it not be proof that I had no place among the chosen? How would my community judge me? Worst of all, how would Patience judge me? Thus did I begin a life of deceit, a series of mounting lies to everyone, especially my beloved.

“Charles,” she asked one September morning as I was preparing to leave for work, “have not the city’s declining fortunes affected your business?”

“Hardly at all,” I responded. “By letting part of our work force go, I’ve saved enough in labor costs that we can weather a moderate decline indefinitely. There is no need to trouble yourself over this.”

“But what of the men and their families whom you no longer employ? What is to happen to them?”

“I have pledged to each and every one of them three-fourths of their salary until they find new employment. They were immensely grateful.”

“Charles! What a lovely thing to do! But I shouldn’t be surprised, for it’s the right thing to do, and you are a righteous man indeed.”  She had completely accepted this fabrication, hugged me, and bestowed a passionate kiss upon me. A righteous man would be consumed with guilt by this, but I was already preparing my next lie.

“Patience, my darling, I won’t be home for supper tonight. I have an important business meeting to attend and will return very late. You could visit your mother tonight, if you wish.”  She happily agreed to this suggestion.

We believe work to be virtuous, but where is virtue when one can find so little to do? Incoming orders to transport goods to points west had plunged. The warehouse, greatly enlarged and refurbished with borrowed money, was less than a third occupied with goods to be transported. Thus, I spent the day on the edge of despair, reading the increasingly insistent letters from the banks. These I answered with deceitful replies, claiming that new orders had risen over the previous month and that the debt I had incurred would be paid with only slight additional delay.

At the end of this disheartening day, I rode west to an inn at the outskirts of the city, being of no mind to feign merriment with the merchants and professional people who frequented the establishments in the business district. However, once I reached the inn, a glass of wine and a hearty stew of boar raised my spirits considerably and prepared me for what lay ahead. I then resumed a westward course, thankful for pleasant autumnal weather and a dry road free of ruts. The change in the color of the trees was as beautiful as any I could remember, providing welcome distraction from my growing unease regarding the two sisters I sought. I had known of these two since childhood and had been warned to shun them. Almost never did they venture into the city, and I had not seen them for years. All details now forgotten, I remembered them only as middle aged spinsters.

More quickly than I would have chosen, the cabin reputed to be the home of the two sisters became visible as I surmounted the crest of a hill and gazed down into a shallow valley. The cabin appeared in a rather poor state of repair and looked uninhabited but for the smoke drifting from its chimney. After dismounting and securing the reins of my horse to an odd piece of pagan statuary in front of the cabin, I approached the door and knocked hesitantly. There was no response of any kind, and a part of me began to hope that none was forthcoming. I knocked a second time with still no sign of any stirring within. When I turned to remount my horse, a woman’s voice broke the silence. “Whom do you seek?”

A glance back at the cabin door showed it still shut, but a dark-haired woman now stood at the left side of the cabin, some ten yards away. She appeared more vigorous than I expected, likely at the transition from her third decade to her fourth, a youthfulness still lingering. Then a second woman appeared at her side, appearing of similar age and visage although slightly smaller in stature. Neither showed any hint of apprehension at the arrival of a stranger. As they approached, it took some effort to stand my ground.

“Who are you, and how may we be of service?” the second woman asked.

“I am Charles Silsbury, a businessman in Philadelphia. I… my business that is, has fallen upon hard times,” I replied, reluctant to admit my misfortune even to these two strangers.

“Pray come inside and have tea,” the slightly taller sister responded. The inside of the cabin, a single room, was clean and orderly, and they bade me to be seated at a small round table near the hearth. In one corner of the room stood an old spinning wheel. In another, two cupboards with multiple shelves held uncountable bottles, jars and tins. There was only one bed, its length placed against the wall opposite the front door and adjacent to a partially opened window. Four tall posts of polished mahogany supported the bed, and the remainder of the wooden furniture appeared to be equally well-fashioned.

The tea they served was highly aromatic, extremely hot, and flavored with a variety of herbs which gradually settled into the bottom of my cup. Instead of arousing me, the tea had a calming effect, perhaps taking me off my guard. After several swallows, life itself seemed to slow, and my mind latched upon one thing at a time, no longer racing from one conjecture to another. I was also able to focus on individual sounds in the room, including the ticking of a single-handed clock atop the fireplace mantle. This mindfulness was most queer, yet pleasant, and with the two of them seated expectantly at the table, I began my story, now unable to withhold anything.

They had offered no introduction of themselves, and I chose not to ask, suspecting there would be no meaningful response. But in my own mind did I name them. The taller would be Smirk, for the sneer that wrestled constantly with her otherwise welcoming smile. The shorter, who smiled not at all, became Malice; her eerie stare unnerved me until the tea had completely taken hold. Both women listened intently and never once interrupted to ask a question, simply nodding with understanding as I explained my situation. In my confession, I acknowledged my godless ambitions and the unyielding pride that had engendered so many fabrications. The closest either of them came to making any rebuke occurred when Smirk said “You wish us to help you out of the pit you’ve dug,” but fortunately, neither sister inquired as to why I believed they could do so. Had they asked, I would have felt compelled to answer.

“Yes, I entreat you. I see no way to help myself.” After a moment’s silence, the two women glanced at each other, and Malice gave her sister the merest of nods. Smirk rose and approached one of the cupboards, whereupon she took hold of a short, wide, cylindrical candle. This she placed within an open-top glass container almost twice the height of the candle, then brought it to the table and reseated herself.

“This candle will enable you to harness a power which cannot be exhausted; its source is eternal,” Smirk said.  The candle was brown, the brown of old blood, but I made no inquiry regarding its origin.

“While the soul resides within the body,” Malice continued, “even a body ravaged by disease, it is safe. And when the body dies and the soul has neared its heavenly destination, also is it safe, provided the individual led a virtuous life. Yet there is a time during which every soul is vulnerable to those who are bold enough to entrap and harness it for their own purposes; this occurs just as the soul emerges from its corpse. For only a moment, it is as helpless as a newborn baby emerging from its mother.”

“Take this candle and place it at the bedside of one who is at death’s door,” Smirk said as she pushed it toward me. “The dying individual must be of good moral character, and the candle must be lit just before the moment of death. Do not light the candle too soon, lest it melt completely and lose its flame. At the instant at which the soul departs its body, the candle will flare suddenly with a bright blue light. Thus will you know that you have succeeded.”

“Succeeded?” I asked.

“In capturing the soul and imprisoning it within the flame,” Malice answered. “Once trapped, the soul becomes unable to ascend toward its destination, and the energy it expends in vain is yours to harness until the candle is willfully snuffed and the soul set free.”  A shudder took me, for in that moment, I fully believed they possessed the power to bring about such an abomination. But how was I ever to bring myself to interdict the baptized and consecrated soul of a fellow Christian and withhold from it the beatific vision? All this merely to escape a financial calamity of my own making?

Smirk saw this incertitude take hold and said, “Once the flame has captured the soul, no harm will come to it, and the candle will burn indefinitely without further consumption of its substance. When your affairs have been set to rights, snuff the candle to release the soul so it may continue its journey. Resist the temptation to keep the soul beyond a restoration to what you once had. Contain your greed and seek nothing more.”  Still uncertain, yet unwilling to display any further lack of resolve, I accepted the candle and would later choose whether or not to employ it.

“What of my payment to you?” I asked.

“You are in no position to pay us now,” Malice answered. “We will name a price once you are restored.”  With that, our meeting concluded, and I remounted my steed to return home.

Weeks passed with no interruption of the downward spiral of my fortunes, weeks during which I came to chastise myself for foolishly believing that the sisters could provide me with a solution. Yet, a debate continued to rage within me as to whether I would execute their plan if the opportunity presented itself, but time was running out. I had received a writ of lien and eviction concerning my warehouse and all its contents. My creditors intended to sell everything at a time of severely depressed market prices and would not obtain sufficient funds to satisfy their claims against me. They would subsequently investigate my personal holdings and assets to make themselves whole.

Heretofore, the thought of actually creating the precise opportunity to entrap a departing soul had not occurred to me, but spurred by the writ of eviction, I devised an ingenious plan to find an elderly and righteous citizen near his or her natural death. And my church would be the vehicle for executing this plan. Showered with praise from Patience, I volunteered to become one of those who visited the sick and dying. The church itself would supply me with the information and the pretext I needed to enter the homes of the most vulnerable, and if this plan failed and I was eventually forced to rely upon the charity of the church to mitigate the effects of my impending ruin, there would likely be a reservoir of good will upon which to draw. So occupied was I in lauding myself for this clever solution, I scarcely considered its predatory and heinous nature.

Within days, my sights were narrowed to an excellent prospect. The Widow Huxford, age sixty-seven, was in a pitiful state of physical ruin. Blind and ravaged by lockjaw and dropsy, she would welcome her imminent death as a merciful event. Her daughter, Anne Crofton, was exhausted from caring for her mother and a family of her own, and she accepted with alacrity and gratitude my offer as a fellow church member to spend two nights a week with her infirm parent.

My vigil began on a Sunday night at the Widow Huxford’s two story freshly painted home on Canal Street where I was warmly greeted by Anne. Many hurricane lamps illuminated the first floor of the home, and the absence of the unpleasant odor associated with the cheaper varieties of whale oil further attested to the widow’s affluence. Upstairs in her room, she lay in bed, propped upright with three pillows, her dropsy and shortness of breath having progressed. Both her eyes were a milky opaque, and gangrenous bedsores on her backside produced a truly wretched odor. Anne informed me that the bedsores had worsened rapidly when her mother’s failing respirations no longer permitted her to assume a recumbent position on her side, but she did not apologize for her mother’s condition and tended to her with great affection. My task seemed simple. I could hasten the widow’s suffocation merely by removing the pillows which kept her upright and thus be assured that her death would transpire while I was present with the candle afire.

Having determined to carry out my plan on returning three nights later, I arrived promptly at nine o’clock, assured Anne that I would not stray from her mother’s bedside, and bade her goodnight from the front door as she descended the stoop to return to her own dwelling. Inside, I climbed the sturdy but creaking staircase and entered the widow’s bedroom, finding her immobile with eyelids closed. Had she already died? Was I too late? I strode to her bedside and placed my palm against her forehead, finding her feverish and damp. After observing her intently for several additional moments, I detected the gentlest undulation of the nightgown that covered her chest, yet the movement lacked the regular cadence of normal respiration. I had witnessed this pattern previously at the death of my own mother, in which progressively deeper and more rapid respirations were followed by a brief period during which respiration ceased entirely. This was repeated every forty to sixty seconds, always leaving an observer wondering if the last breath had been taken.

I removed the unholy candle from my valise and placed it on the nightstand next to an oil lamp, then procured a long match to transfer the flame from the oil lamp to the candle. When the match flamed brightly, I withdrew it from the lamp and moved it to the opening of the glass in which the candle lay. But with the flaming match only an inch away from the candle wick, my arm froze in hesitation.

As my determination wavered, the widow entered an episode of apnea more prolonged than its predecessors. My own breathing also ceased as I wondered if she had taken her last breath before the brown candle was lit, yet she began again, and when I glanced back at the candle, it was aflame! This could only have occurred by means of a force beckoning from within the candle rather than by my own volition.

The candle burned with a shuddering glow, throwing prancing silhouettes about the room. I thought of extinguishing the oil lamp, but decided that it best not contain a full measure of oil on the morrow, and thus my vigil continued. Carriages passed in the street below, and I watched as a nearly full moon was first shrouded and then unveiled by the passage of clouds. And still she breathed. I checked the candle and found to my alarm that less than a third of its brown substance remained. Was this frail old woman defying me? 

Thus far, I had done nothing that could be construed as harmful, but with the candle continuing to shrink seemingly quicker than before, I snatched her pillows away and left her completely supine. Now I had truly crossed a bridge and burnt it behind me. The minutes passed, and still she breathed.

She was defying me, somehow mindful of my impending ruin and waiting for the candle to extinguish itself before drawing her final breath. Another glance at the candle revealed mere moments remaining!

Panic ignited a fury within me, a fury at her willful defiance. Grasping a pillow with both hands, I slammed it over her slack face and dropped a knee upon her small bony chest to make respiration twice impossible. Another glimpse of the candle revealed that it still burned. Increasing the pressure of my knee against her chest suddenly caused her breastbone to snap, and a moment later, the candle flared as Smirk and Malice had promised. Her soul was trapped, and it was mine.

Despair! All is lost, all has been taken, even my beautiful Patience. Everyone thinks ill of her, certain that she callously chose to abandon me as we plummeted toward financial ruin. In truth, financial ruin was not the cause of her flight to her parents. I discovered this the moment I returned home on the morning after the Widow Huxford’s demise. Hearing me enter our home, Patience rushed from the kitchen to greet me, but the moment our eyes met, all joy left her and she halted several feet away. She stared at me as if I were a stranger. Or an intruder. All that she could utter was “Oh….”

“Patience, what is it? What is wrong?” I asked as I approached her with extended arms to embrace her. She took several steps back, covered her mouth with her hand, and regarded me in uneasy silence and confusion. Had the stain of murder descended upon me? A stain that was all too apparent to her? She turned her back on me and quickly ascended the staircase, whereupon I rushed to the large mirror in our foyer to search for what had repulsed her. Exhaustion from a lack of sleep, something which normally evoked her solicitous nature, was evident, but an unmistakable darkness had also crept into my countenance, and I liked it not. Not at all.

My entreaties to her were as futile as those directed to my creditors; she simply was no longer mine to cherish. I soon found myself possessing little more than my personal items, a small sum of money that I had disclosed to no one, and the mysterious candle that continued to burn day after day after day. Those who observed my protective and covetous manner regarding the candle thought me deranged, and I did little to discourage this attitude since it caused them to leave me in peace.

Left to my own devices and living alone in a cheaply furnished, poorly-lit room for rent, I examined the events of the preceding weeks, focusing primarily on my encounter with the two witches. How else to regard them? The candle was no less enchanted than a goose which lays golden eggs, but it had brought me nothing but ruin. Had it not flared brightly at the very moment of the widow Huxford’s death, as promised by Smirk and Malice? And do I not flinch when a twig snaps underfoot, scolding me with the echo of the widow’s breastbone as it cracked?

Presently, I came upon a frightful conjecture, that the candle was no talisman or channel of good fortune, but rather a cursed object or a weapon, and that I was nothing more than the sisters’ means of procurement. They had made an unmitigated fool of me! They knew full well the candle’s ruinous effect and that I must return to them seeking explanation and redress, the evil instrument in my possession.

How had I have become sufficiently gullible to believe that a scheme requiring the death of a God-fearing and righteous woman, a member of my own congregation, could bring me anything but despair? My murderous rage, at an imagined defiance on the widow’s part, had arisen from nothing more than her innocent grasping at the last tendrils of God-given life. What to do? What to do, indeed!

If the sisters’ plan was to obtain this wretched candle, I might yet thwart them. By extinguishing the candle, the widow’s soul could be freed, and this cursed object need never fall into their hands. Their possession and use of it would only bring misery to others. Thus might I redeem myself and vow to live righteously until the end of my days. But the appeal of this plan began to fade when I considered that I may have blundered in some way while capturing the widow’s soul. But how?

Whipsawed by this conundrum, I paced my small dark room in search of a resolute plan. If I extinguished the candle before seeking the sisters’ counsel, I would surely spend the rest of my life wondering if I had discarded an opportunity for great wealth, perhaps even regaining the love and admiration of my dear Patience. This propelled me to a decision. I would return to Smirk and Malice with the candle, but carry a weapon of my own.

With a borrowed steed, I retraced my previous journey westward, this time stopping around midday at the same small establishment where I had supped four weeks prior. Emerging from the inn after a satisfying meal, I was tempted by light rain and distant thunder to remain there, perhaps overnight, but ultimately chose to continue my journey to conserve what little money remained. Before long, I regretted this decision, a storm soaking and chilling me, its thunder pummeling my ears and terrifying my steed. The road became enveloped in mud, slowing my progress and causing my trek to seem interminable, yet I knew there was no risk that the ensorcelled candle would be extinguished.

Upon finally arriving at the sisters’ cabin, I thumped the front door impatiently with my entire forearm and demanded entrance. The door abruptly swung inward, and Malice beckoned me to enter. Smirk took my coat and hung it on a hook attached to the inside surface of the door. Had they expected me on so wretched a day?

“Please be—” Malice began, but halted as I extracted the candle and its glass enclosure from a leather sack and lay it upon their table. Both women took a step back from it, then stared at me.

“What have you done?” Smirk demanded.

“I have followed your every instruction and entrapped a soul, the soul of a righteous woman, a member of my own congregation, but disaster and despair have become my daily lot,” I answered in an accusatory tone. “Everything has been taken from me, and my wife has fled to her parents.”

Wordlessly, both sisters slowly approached the candle for a closer inspection, I believing they wished to determine precisely how little of the brown substance remained. But I was mistaken; this was not their intention.

“How do you perceive the flame?” Smirk asked, turning to me with eyes blazing.

“As you can plainly see, it is bright crimson,” I replied. “And it flared at the instant the emerging soul of an old woman was entrapped.”

In a slow threatening tone, Malice uttered “You … must take that candle away from here at once and never return. It poses a grievous threat. You killed her, didn’t you?”

“I had to! The candle was near to extinguishing, yet on she lingered.”

“Simple instructions were you given,” Malice continued, penetrating me with that eerie stare. “You were to be in attendance at the moment of death, not cause it. Worse, the soul entrapped in the flame is no more virtuous than your own. Its destiny is eternal punishment.”

“How is that possible? Everyone knew her to be a saintly and pious woman,” I pleaded.

“She most likely murdered her husband, no saint himself I’d wager,” Smirk answered. “T’is such a simple thing to poison a man’s porridge.”

“But what threat does the candle pose?” I continued in a voice that both demanded and pleaded.

“If the candle is willfully extinguished, the widow’s soul, inexorably pulled to the pit, will drag with it a soul like itself, one to delight the demons, one with which to bargain with them,” Smirk said. I was about to ask whose soul will it choose? when the answer lept upon me. I would be its victim, for I had murdered the Widow Huxford. These two witches were no paragons of virtue, but I gathered that neither had committed that most heinous of crimes. Yet they wanted me gone quickly and with the flame at my side.

“But what am I to do?” I pleaded unabashedly, my pride now smothered in desperation.

“You must search for another,” Malice answered. “One whose crimes are darker than your own. Only in his company may you smother the flame, for the widow’s soul would reward the demons with one more hideous than your own.”

With this admonition, I took my leave, never to see either of them again. I knew I must rid myself of this accursed candle. Only then might my fortunes be restored and the redemption of my soul sought.

Months have passed, and I have been unable to rebuild my life.  The ill fortune of the red-flamed candle thwarts me at every turn. There is nothing for it but to live in penury and continue my quest for someone more deserving of damnation than I. Surely such an individual can be found among a population of eighty thousand, for is there anything more certain than the reprobate nature of man?

Charity from my congregation and an occasional stint of manual labor enable me to keep body and soul together, and each night I renew my search for a monster in the City of Brotherly Love. The crimson flame is now enclosed within a brass lantern. Its metal handle creaks in a regular cadence as it sways by my side. Some of the regulars on the streets and in the alleys continue to jeer me. “Diogenes, if you haven’t found an honest man by now, give up!” Others, more perceptive, remain silent and avoid me.

My inability to assess character, evidenced by my foolhardy selection of the Widow Huxford months ago, has meant that I must witness a crime so heartless that the widow will be compelled to drag someone other than myself into the pit. Only then will I extinguish the flame. I believe my quest to be right-minded, for surely it is no sin to ensnare the damned.

The post PseudoPod 561: Better to Curse the Darkness than Light a Candle appeared first on PseudoPod.