PseudoPod

• Author : Jason Rush
• Narrator : Hollis Monroe
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 531: Gleed is a PseudoPod original.

Gleed by Jason Rush

The first thing I notice is that goddamn old-timey music, Suwanee River or some shit.

I smell stale peanuts and beer. Also coal and dirt, but that’s always there. As much my fault as anyone’s.

I’m already seated. My head sags, and my hands rest on a small, oak table. Car keys and cell phone in front of me.

My head pounds.

“Guys?” Danny says across from me. My brow creases as I look up. He, Johnson and Huck sit around the table. My crew. Why are their hardhats still on? Dirty work clothes. Smudges of grime on their faces. And how the fuck did we get here?

Johnson’s jaw hangs slack, and a bead of spit gathers in the corner of his mouth. He stares down at the table like he doesn’t know we’re here. Like he doesn’t know he’s here.

A trace of blood crusts Huck’s cheek below his ear.

“Guys,” Danny says again. “Where are we?” He’s the youngest–still a kid, really–and he looks like he’s gonna cry.

“The bar,” I say, and because giving Danny shit is what we do, I mumble, “Dumbass.”

“But…” Danny shakes his head. He looks to Huck, cuz Huck’s the one that doesn’t treat him like a kid, but Huck ain’t moving. Head down. Eyes blank. No one home. “I don’t remember coming here.”

There’s movement over my shoulder as the waitress walks up. Peggy. I know her. She’s always on the night shift. She ought to feel familiar, but she doesn’t. Nothing does.

She taps a pencil against her order pad, head cocked so graying hair spills over one shoulder. “Well?” she says, impatient, like she’s asked for our order already. Tap tap tap with the pencil.

I run a hand over my face, and my beard bristles. I look back at my crew. Johnson lifts his head like he’s just waking up, eyes filled with confusion. Shaggy gray hair pokes out under his hard hat. His crow’s feet flex as he squints. He wipes the bead of spit with the back of his hand.

I want him to take lead, tell me what’s going on, but he looks dazed, like a cartoon character that got whacked in the head.

Turning back to Peggy, I say, “The usual.” Anything to get rid of her.

She raises an eyebrow, then shrugs. “Okay, sugar.” She turns, but not before I see her eyes roll. Then she’s gone, back to the kitchen.

Old Mike stands at the bar, wiping the counter. The wall behind him is covered in antique crap. Six shooters and pickaxes and horseshoes. There’s a faded photo of Doc Holliday next to what Old Mike says is a bullet hole, shot by Doc himself when Mike’s great grandfather ran the joint. Or great great grandfather. Whatever.

A flatscreen TV flashes scenes of Butch and Sundance getting ready to jump, and the player piano in the corner hammers away on its own. Tourist bullshit. I hate this place. Hate this town.

Johnson looks around, then turns to me, face tight. “We were at work.” His voice is like a bucket of gravel. “When did we get here?”

A stab of cold pricks my gut. I’ve never seen Johnson lost before.

I shake my head. Last thing I remember is being underground with the drone of the continuous miner, blades churning, rock crumbling. The thunk of a six-foot bolt driven into the ceiling. The smell of dust and rock and coal.

(A dull, red light. Someone screaming.)

Then here. Looking at my hands. Peggy tapping her pencil.

Beside me, Huck groans and looks up. His eyes are jerky, like he’s concussed. They flit from Johnson to me to Danny. Back to Johnson. He opens his mouth, starts to say something, but cuts short with a gasp.

His head snaps back, and we all flinch at the movement. His eyes go wide. He clamps his hands to the side of his head. “Oh Jesus,” he says. I notice the crusted blood under his ear again. “Jesus, no.” His voice is higher. Shrill. Eyes squeezed shut, gripping his head like he’s holding it together. “Something’s coming.”

Then he screams.

And that’s when it moves, like a worm in my ear. It slithers, squirms, wraps the ear canal. Slime and ooze. I hear it squish, echoing in the dark of my mind. And, oh God, it speaks, whispers, Something’s coming. This is the end.

I jerk to my feet, and my chair topples. I clutch my head in my hands. “Get it out!” I scream. “Christ, get it out!” My heel catches, and I plummet, crashing to the floor. Something’s coming. I claw at my head, thrashing, flailing. Something’s coming. This is the end.

It stops.

Silence.

The worm is still. Can’t feel it. Can’t hear it.

I’m panting, hyperventilating, can’t fill my lungs.

The table behind me rocks on its side. I must’ve knocked it over when I fell. Huck’s still seated, eyes wide, gripping our table like he could dig his nails into it. He’s shaking. Johnson and Danny are on their feet, staring, first at me, then Huck, then back. Peggy and Old Mike gawk by the bar. Peggy has our pitcher of beer and four glasses, but she doesn’t bring them, just stands there, mouth open.

Huck is mumbling, “Jesus” and “Oh Jesus” and “Jesus fuck.” He buries his head in his arms and sobs.

“What the hell,” Danny says, a quiver in his voice.

Johnson is the first to move. He rounds the table and squats beside me. “You hurt?” I shake my head, and he says, “Can you get up?” Hooking a hand under my armpit, he lifts. My legs are jelly. I wobble, but he keeps me steady. At first I think he’ll set me back at the table, but he looks across the empty room at Peggy and Old Mike and says to me, “Let’s go.” He scoops up my keys and phone and says to Danny, “Get Huck and let’s go.”

I hear Peggy mutter something about “crazy”, and Old Mike grunts his agreement.

Then we’re outside. The light from the bar and a single streetlight across the lot push back at the dark. It smells like snow. I’m panting, and my breath clouds the air in front of me. The gravel parking lot crunches under my feet.

“What the fuck happened in there?” Johnson says.

I shake my head. No words could show him, make him see.

Behind me, Huck says, “It’s coming,” over and over, blubbering nonsense, “Christ” and “Jesus” and I want him to shut up, just shut the fuck up.

Danny tells him, “It’s okay, I got ya,” but his voice doesn’t match the words. It’s shaky, scared, like a kid that just got whupped.

Seeing my truck, I pull my arm from Johnson’s grip, but Johnson grabs me and yanks me back. “The fuck you think you’re going?”

“My truck.”

“You think you’re driving?” He shakes his head and drags me to his pickup. The doors unlock with a beep-beep, and I jump at the sound. Johnson tugs the passenger side open and shoves me in, then jerks the seatbelt over my shoulder. Danny and Huck pile into the bucket seats in the back.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Danny says, and I hear the pat-pat-pat of his hand on Huck’s shoulder.

“It’s not,” Huck says, mumbles, sobs. “It’s not gonna be okay, it’s fucked, it’s all fucked.”

I can’t get a good picture of what’s going on around me. My vision is mackled. Everything’s jerky, like shitty cellphone video. “Where are we going?” My voice feels thick.

“Hospital,” Johnson says, sliding into the driver’s seat and jamming the keys in the ignition.

“I’m fine.” I close my eyes to stop from puking.

“You ain’t fine.” Johnson peers over his shoulder into the back seat. “Huck neither. We’re going to the hospital.”

I feel something warm and wet against my earlobe. I wipe at it, and my fingers come away with blood.

“What the hell happened, man?” Danny says behind us. I crane my neck to see him. His face is white–a ghost under the glare of the streetlight. He shakes his head. “I mean, what the hell?”

Fucking kid.

The engine cranks and shudders to a start. The dashboard clock blinks, then settles on 12:03 AM. End of our shift was four hours ago. Where the fuck have we been?

As the truck backs up, I put my face in my hands, trying to stop the world from spinning. We pause at the edge of the parking lot as one lonely car passes. Johnson pulls out. He glances at me but doesn’t say anything. He’s not a talker.

Huck has settled down a bit. Silence in the back seat. Just the hum of the engine. Hum of the road.

Then Danny screams.

Johnson flinches at the sound, jerking the wheel. Tires screech. My head thumps against the window. I thought I had my hardhat on, but it must’ve come off back at the bar.

With another jerk, the truck steadies.

Behind me, Danny screams and squeals. His shrill voice drills in my head, and I want to die.

I want to tell him to be a man, but the swerving has my stomach all fucked, and I think if I open my mouth I’ll vomit.

Then he quiets. I hear him sob, talking, yammering under his breath, voice choked with sorrow. “Something’s coming,” he says. “I can feel it rising.”

“You’re okay,” Huck says. “I’m here. I gotcha.”

The cold window presses against my forehead. My eyes are closed. I pry them open and see the reflectors on the road zip past us. The motion is unsettling, and I close my eyes again.

“Johnson,” I say.

He grunts. His response to most shit, but you get to know the tones, and this grunt says, Yeah, what?

“You shouldn’t be driving.”

He grunts again, and this one I take to mean, Shut the fuck up.

“You’ll be next,” I say, “and you shouldn’t be driving.”

“Well the hospital ain’t comin’ to us.”

The headlights make two overlapping circles on the road ahead of us, and the center line flashes through them, blip, blip, blip. I close my eyes. “Call a fucking ambulance,” I mutter.

He grunts. Shut the fuck up again.

Ambulance takes too long, he’s thinking. Maybe an hour, out here in the boondocks. He thinks he can get us there faster, but he can’t. He won’t. We won’t make it.

“I felt it,” Danny says behind me, voice shaking. “Moving in my ear. A fucking worm. Something. What’s happening to us?”

“I know,” Huck says.

“I don’t want to die.”

“We’re gonna be okay.”

I want to tell Huck to stop coddling that goddam kid. Time for him to man up. But then I see the glow of lights over the next ridge.

“No,” I say, lifting my head to look at Johnson. “Not this way.”

Johnson doesn’t answer, but if he did, he’d say this is the way to the hospital, and tell me to shut up.

“Not this way, man. Stop. Don’t go this way.”

The road snakes, and we round the last curve before the mine. The lights are blinding after the dark of the highway. I squint and hold a hand up to shield my eyes. The giant sign by the road reads, “Gleed Industries”.

(A dull, red light. Someone screaming.)

“No!” I reach for the wheel, don’t know what for, what I’m expecting to do. Jack it to the side? Swerve us off the road? Anything but pass the fucking mine. But before my hand gets there, Johnson lets go. His eyes bug out. He slams his hands to the sides of his head and screams.

We careen off the asphalt to the dirt shoulder. The truck lurches, throwing me against the seatbelt strap. Huck is shouting behind me. Danny cries out. The world outside the windshield is a blur. The “Gleed Industries” sign races toward us. Johnson grips his head and screeches. I grab the wheel and crank, and gravel spins under the wheels as the truck fishtails, slides sideways, the sign growing bigger and bigger in Johnson’s window. I grit my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut and brace.

Slam!

The side of the truck crumples. My head whips to the left. The seatbelt cuts a line across my shoulder. Johnson’s skull hits the side window with a crack. Shattered glass sprays my face. The truck rocks. Glass tinkles. Danny and Huck pant and gasp in the back.

Then silence.

I taste blood.

My shoulder hurts where the seatbelt dug in.

I open my eyes a crack. I’m twisted to the side, hung up by the seatbelt. My neck hurts. My head lolls. I sit up, and pain flares in my side as a rib shifts. Groaning, I slump back into the harness.

No one says anything. Are they in shock? Unconscious? I’ll have to sit up to see, but I’m scared of that rib shifting again.

I close my eyes and take a breath. When I’m relaxed, I put a hand on the seat and push, straightening my body. My rib aches, but I take it slow and manage to get all the way up.

Behind me, Danny says, “It’s time,” with the voice of a man being walked to the noose.

Johnson leans against the crumpled door. His face is splattered with blood. Eyes closed. I nudge him. “Johnson?”

Danny says “oh God” over and over behind me.

“Hey, Johnson,” I say, and nudge him again.

Johnson’s eyes snap open. “It’s time.” And there’s nothing in his expression, like Johnson’s gone, and there’s a puppeteer with a hand up his ass. He grabs the handle of his door and pushes, but it’s jammed against the “Gleed” sign. The door thunks, and glass tinkles. He pushes again. And again.

“Okay,” I say. “This way, let’s get out my side, man.”

He keeps pushing.

“Johnson.” I put a hand on his shoulder.

His head whips to face me, and Jesus Christ, there really is nothing behind those eyes.

“It’s time,” he says.

In the back, Danny says, “It’s here.”

And Huck says, “This is the end.”

The worm moves again, slithers, squirms, the squish squish echoing in my ear, in the darkness inside me, and I scream, but my mouth doesn’t move, and there’s no sound, and I grab my head, but my hands lay still at my sides. My muscles flex, but they don’t. I convulse, thrash, bash my head against the window, but nothing happens. My body doesn’t respond. All the movement is in my mind. Impulses that are never sent. My body is relaxed. Quiet. Seated. Still.

“It’s time,” I say, and it’s my voice, my mouth moving, but it isn’t me speaking, it’s the worm, and oh God, it whispers in my head, Something’s coming, and my mouth moves again, and says, “It’s here.”

My mind goes black with panic. Can’t move, can’t scream. The worm slithers and whispers, and through my terror, I feel my hand shift. It slips the seatbelt off and reaches for the door, pushes it open. My legs slide out. The cracked rib pops in my side. I want to double over from the pain. Want to scream. Collapse. But I step out of the truck and walk.

Behind me, the others crawl out, and I hear their footsteps following me across the lot.

“Something’s coming,” I say.

“Rising,” Johnson says.

“Coming,” Danny says.

“It’s here,” Huck says.

No no no, I scream in my head, trying to stop from speaking again, to stop walking, to fall to the ground in a ball, stop the pain in my side, stop the slither in my ear, in my head, but all I do is say, “This is the end,” and march through the lot with my crew.

There’s no one else in the parking area, but there are cars, and I hear the noises of the night shift operations. The buzz of the conveyor belt, the white noise of the coal-washing plant. Our bodies wind through the vehicles, feet shuffling over gravel, until we stop in front of the elevator. It stands alone at the edge of the lot, away from the buildings, away from the man-trip vehicles at the main entrance. The fastest way in. Right above the deepest part of the mine. Right above where we were digging yesterday.

(A dull, red light. Someone screaming.)

I don’t want to go back, can’t go back, won’t go back, and the worm whispers, psss psss psss. 

Johnson hits the button, saying, “This is it.”

And I say, “It’s coming.”

The elevator dings and slides open.

No no no no.

My feet step for the door. I will my hand to move, and finally, my body reacts. Grabbing the side of the cage, I push back, stumble, trip, fall to my ass, and a cloud of dust sprays up around me.

The worm shifts, squish squish in my ear, tightening, and my body belongs to it again. I’m sitting on the ground, trying to flail and scramble away and run, but instead I stand, my bad rib grinding in my side, but I can’t cry out, can’t scream, can’t fight it as I follow the others into the elevator and the doors slide shut behind me.

Gears whine as we descend. My breath rasps. My heart pounds.

No one speaks. We stand and sway as the elevator drops through its shaft, down into the darkness that’s rising around us. My eyes flit left and right, searching for a way out, a way to move, hit the emergency stop button, smash the panel, pry the doors open, jump, run, but we just stand and sway and descend into the pit.

“This is the end,” Huck says, and the elevator slows to a stop.

The door slides open.

The room is a grid, giant paths we’ve dug out, with pillars left untouched to support the ceiling. We exit the elevator (no no no), rounding the first pillar, and the cavern opens up a hundred yards in front of us. At the end, the continuous miner sits dormant, engine silent, rotors still. Beyond it, a crack gapes along the wall, a couple feet wide, and a dull, red light glows through.

I remember now. Remember the wall crumbling, Johnson killing the engine. I remember peering through the fissure, the walls flush with red light, thinking, Why didn’t we know this was here?

Huck screaming behind me.

Then nothing. Peggy tapping her pencil.

I don’t want to go back. Can’t go back. The red gets brighter as we march through the mine. I feel its heat on my face. Sweat trickles down my forehead, gets in my eye, but I can’t wipe it away, can’t move anything but my feet, marching, marching forward.

I hear distant operations–machinery, engines–but it’s quiet in this sector. The night crew isn’t here. No sign of them.

As we approach, I hear footsteps echoing down one of the corridors to the right, and someone rounds the corner next to the miner.

“Sigmund?” he shouts, and his voice echoes in the dark acoustics. I recognize him but don’t know his name. Some night-crew guy I’ve seen in passing. The name he’s calling, though, Sigmund, that’s the foreman of the crew that should be here, working this area.

“Sigmund?” he says again. “Ops has been calling. Where the fuck are you guys?”

Hope sparks in my chest. He can save us. Stop this. Call the police. The ambulance. The army. I try to scream for help, but the worm slithers and tightens, and I’m lost. I groan inside, but on the outside I’m calm, marching forward.

The night-crew guy rounds the edge of the continuous miner and draws up short. I hear him gasp as he sees the fissure. The dull, red light. He leans forward and mutters, “What the fuck?”

I want to tell him to run. To save himself.

We’re almost to him. He hears our footsteps behind him and spins. He squints, eyes jumping from Johnson, to Huck, to me, to Danny. He shakes his head. “Johnson?” He checks his watch. “The fuck are you guys doing here?”

“Something’s coming,” Johnson says.

A shadow passes over the guy’s neck. A thin, dark line, slithering upward, and I want to reach out, grab it, stop it, but I’m too far, and I can’t move anyway, I just march forward, my body focused on the fissure.

“What the–” the guy says, and swats at his neck, but too late, and the shadow slides across his earlobe and disappears inside him. “No.” He grabs his ear. “No!” And then it’s all screams. Pleas to God, to Jesus, to us, for anyone to get it out and make it stop.

His knees drop out from under him, and he slams to the rock floor. He convulses, hands gripping his head, back arched, eyes squeezed shut, kicking and howling, all nonsense now, no words, just unintelligible screeches.

We walk past him. Our bodies are calm, but inside, I want to run, charge the wall, bash my head into the rock. Anything to stop this placid march.

We pass the continuous miner. I think I see blood pooling at the foot of the driver’s side door, but I can’t turn my head to look.

Behind us, the screams silence. I hear the man shuffle to his feet, suddenly calm and quiet. “Something’s coming,” he whispers, and his footsteps tap down the passageway toward the elevator.

He’ll move on autopilot, go wherever he would go–the bar, home, somewhere–until the worm in his ear decides it has control. Decides it’s time and brings him back.

We’re stopped in front of the fissure now. Not close enough to see in, but I feel the heat. It pushes at me like a wall. Smothers me. My eyes water. Sweat drips down my brow.

Huck steps forward. He stands for a second with his back to us, silhouetted against the red opening in the rock. Squatting, he shoves at the rubble. I hear the loose rocks shift and thunk, echoing through the cavern. My heart pounds. I know what he’s looking for, what he wants, what the worm in his head wants. I don’t know how, but I know, I see it in my mind before Huck stands and turns to face us, an eight-inch knife in his hand.

I shake my head, but it doesn’t move. I tell him to drop it, to run, but no sound comes out.

The blade is old. Ancient. Iron, with dents and imperfections from where it was hammered on a forge. It’s been waiting for us. For so long, it can’t be measured in time. Forever. Strange characters are etched across the blade, no language I’ve ever seen, but somehow I know what it says, and I say it too, “This is the end.”

Huck backs to the edge of the crack in the wall, still facing us. I see the fear in his eyes now, the only thing that tells me he’s still there, deep inside that body. Red glows around him on all sides. Through the fissure, there is emptiness. The ground drops away behind him. I can’t see the far wall. Huck steps back. His heel hangs over the brink. He raises the knife. A tear spills down his cheek as he presses the blade against his throat.

No no no, I think, but I can’t move, can’t stop it, and Huck slices.

His throat opens beneath the blade, red pouring down his neck and chest. He gags. The knife drops from his grip and clatters to the stone floor. Huck’s eyes roll back in his head. He teeters, then falls through the gap, into the red abyss.

I want to reach for him, but I can’t, and he’s gone.

I scream, but there’s no sound and my mouth doesn’t move, it’s just my voice in my head, howling and howling into the silence.

The worm wraps around my ear canal and squeezes. My feet move, one step, two, toward the dull, red light, and oh God, I want to stop, but it moves me, marches me forward.

I bend and take up the bloody knife.

“It’s rising,” I say.

“This is the end,” Danny says.

I turn to face them. Please don’t let me die, don’t do this, don’t take me, I don’t want to die, I say, but it’s only in my mind. My jaw is set. My grip squeezes the hilt of the ancient blade. Huck’s blood slickens my fingers.

I raise the knife to my throat, touch it to skin. Oh God. I tense, will my arm to throw it, will my fingers to let it go. No! But the worm whispers, psss psss, and I slice.

Pain rips across my neck. Breath doesn’t come. It gurgles in my open throat. Warm blood washes down my chest.

My fingers release, and I hear the knife hit stone.

I stagger back one step. The edges of my vision tunnel.

Suddenly I’m free. I’m myself. No worm slithering in my ear, whispering, telling me what to do, driving me forward.

I grab my throat, put pressure on it, I can stop it, stop the bleeding, I can survive, if only Johnson or Danny can help, call someone, get me to the hospital, I can survive, I’m not dead, I’m not dead.

“No,” I say, the word drowning in a bubble of blood.

I teeter, fall, grab for the edge of the fissure, miss, and my leg gives. I plunge into the dull, red light, into the abyss.

An eye watches me fall. Watches from below. Rising. Coming. An eye that’s a mouth. It gapes, yawns, ready to swallow me, this is the end, the inferno pulsing heat beneath it, pushing it toward me, the beast, pushing it toward the fissure, toward the world, and I don’t want to die, I pinwheel, grapple for the walls, but there’s nothing, just the fall, and the dull, red light, and that eye that’s a mouth, waiting below to swallow me as it claws its way up.

This is the end.

The post PseudoPod 531: Gleed appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Sean Pearce
• Narrator : Kyle Akers
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 530: The Madness of Bill Dobbs: A Tale of Snuff Movies and Cannibal Cults is a PseudoPod original.

This is the author’s first sale

Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.

YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.

Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.

In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.

This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you

The Madness of Bill Dobbs: A Tale of Snuff Movies and Cannibal Cults By Sean Pearce 

Eaters is regarded by some as a flawed masterpiece and an underground classic. To others, it is vile, racist, ethically bankrupt, and derivative.

It makes for peculiar viewing. The plot follows the formula of the Italian cannibal movies for which director Bill Dobbs had an unashamed fondness. An anthropological expedition into the Amazon jungle encounters and brutalises a tribe of ‘savages’ in the name of science, and find themselves pursued, captured, and finally gruesomely eaten alive.

(The film was originally going to be released as Dark-skinned Cannibals of the Tropics, though thankfully someone more enlightened than Dobbs suggested the title we now have. It almost goes without saying that Dobbs has been unanimously described as a completely unrepentant racist.)

Eaters is a movie with a mythology around it. Dobbs himself famously went insane shortly after release, and no less than three cast members died during location shooting (in what may be a rare flash of good taste, Dobbs chose not to use the footage of the unfortunate actress Lisa Springer’s fatal accident in the film), and, in a strange echo of Cannibal Holocaust before, Dobbs was briefly investigated by the authorities on suspicion of producing a snuff film. However, it was later revealed that Dobbs had in fact bribed an FBI agent into launching the investigation as a publicity stunt – it worked.

Even without the mythos surrounding it, Eaters is a fascinating film. Simply put, it contains moments of brilliance. The cinematography is frequently stunning, and Dobbs’ direction was nothing short of inspired, weakness of the material aside. He created an atmosphere that was utterly otherworldly, almost allowing the humidity of the jungle to seep out of the celluloid. Combined with one of the finest examples of latter-day psychedelia in the score, Dobbs created an oppressive, mysterious, and relentlessly disturbing vision of the world.

There is also the matter of the depiction of the tribe itself. Although Dobbs did convince an actual indigenous tribe in Guatemala to appear in the movie, he insisted that they wear bizarre clothing of his own design, and daub themselves with strange symbols of unknown pedigree. The tribe itself, according to the star of the movie, Marcus Fields, apparently took Dobbs’ requests in good humour and treated the whole exercise as an elaborate game of make-believe (which is one of the most concise and accurate descriptions of cinema I’ve ever heard!). There is much speculation about the origin of the symbolism Dobbs used, but one thing is for sure: it’s unlike anything used by any indigenous population in South America.

The real reason for the notoriety of Eaters is, of course, the rumour of Dobbs’ inspiration for the film. The rumour, that Dobbs’ had essentially lifted the narrative from a deeply obscure and possibly lost Mondo ‘documentary’ emerged several years after the release of the film. Indeed, Eaters would likely have vanished into obscurity if not for the resurgent interest the rumours caused. Seeing that Dobbs wasn’t above bribing federal agents to gain publicity, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he had been the source of these rumours himself, though he had spent the prior five years in a mental asylum, making this unlikely.

It began when Dobbs’ wife, Lydia, in an attempt to raise capital for her husband’s treatment, auctioned off several items relating to the production of the film, including five boxes of notes. Film buff and self-declared ‘eccentric’ Miguel Fernandez purchased the notes, and six months later was interviewed by the horror fanzine Gore Fest, claiming that he had discovered that Dobbs had seen and become obsessed with an Italian Mondo movie entitled The Gods Eat Men! Fernandez allowed photographs of the notes in question to be published in Gore Fest and other zines. It is well known that Mondo ‘documentaries’ would often stage or at least exaggerate the shocking scenes they specialised in bringing to audiences, but this was more extreme than that: Dobbs initially regarded The Gods Eat Men! as a genuine snuff movie.

It’s here we should take note of the definition of a ‘snuff’ movie. A snuff film is not just a film that depicts real death, it is a film where a human being is deliberately killed for the sake of the film. The makers of a snuff film are not simply voyeurs ­­– they actively participate in murder. As such, when Dobbs described TGEM as a genuine snuff film, he meant that he believed he was seeing people dying for the camera.

He later revised that opinion. He decided that he wasn’t watching a snuff movie after all.

He really was watching a documentary.

I have not seen The Gods Eat Men!

Fernandez died in 1990, and his estate (largely consisting of a truly impressive collection of horror memorabilia) was sold off to pay his debts. I tracked down the auction house that had dealt with the goods, but when I consulted their records I was disappointed to note that, although he’d owned a large number of cans of film, none of them contained TGEM.

Dobbs had a copy which he would watch repeatedly, though he destroyed it in the first act of his mental collapse. He refused to let anyone else see it.

No one that I have spoken to, no archive I have consulted, has possessed or been able to point me towards a copy. One man I spoke to, who requested anonymity, claimed to have seen it. ‘It changed me. There are things in it you shouldn’t see. It’s not pretend.’ He would tell me nothing else, not even where he saw it.

The facts that we can be confident about (and here I must thank Edward Carson and Melanie Philips for giving me access to their own research on the subject) are the following:

• The Gods Eat Men! was made in the late 60s.
• It was a production by the (likely pseudonymous) Italian director Giovanni D’Amore.
• It never had any mainstream release, and was distributed underground and illicitly due to the nature of its content.
• No one appears to have tracked down a copy for at least a decade.
• Any surviving copies are likely to exist exclusively in private collections.
• Finally, the film purports to show rituals conducted by a ‘savage’ tribe in Polynesia, which involved human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Dobbs’ notes apparently didn’t contain a synopsis, though he did heavily analyse several scenes, which were translated into his own film. Edward and Melanie have gathered together as many of Dobbs’ notes as they’ve been able to track down. Obviously, Dobbs never meant them to be read by anyone else so they’re difficult to decipher.

One of the most curious things we noticed going through the notes is the detailed sketches of the costumes and symbols that would appear in Eaters. Dobbs apparently lifted them as best he could from TGEM. We took the diagrams to several anthropologists, though only one recognised the symbolism. However, they demanded they not be identified, and refused to look at any of the other documents we had with us once they realised what we were researching. They told us that they were indeed aware of both Dobbs’ and D’Amore’s films, though had seen neither and had ‘absolutely no desire to’, claiming that these films were nothing but neo-colonial exploitation of other cultures – hardly inaccurate. They would tell us nothing further about the tribe in question: not its location, its name, or anything about its customs, just a meek acknowledgement that claims of human sacrifice were ‘not wholly exaggerated’.

So we were left in a bad position. Unable to locate the film, unable to determine what the culture depicted in it is even called, not possessing a single cell of the film, we decided the only thing left for us to do would be to attempt to reconstruct it from Dobbs’ notes in contrast to Eaters.

Through the auction house, we’d discovered that Fernandez had owned a copy of the original workprint of Eaters, and it struck us that the best place to look would be at the rawest version of the film. The workprint was now owned by a small non-profit film preservation society, The Cult Collection. The Collection’s manager, Harvey Smith, sent us a DVD of the workprint, which over the next week we watched at least a dozen times, comparing it against the assembled notes. The key scenes we were interested in were, of course, the ones which Dobbs’ notes pointed to having been lifted from TGEM.

There were various location shots that Dobbs’ apparently modelled on features he’d found especially inspired in TGEM, but we concluded that it was two pivotal scenes that had most closely aped the original: the ‘coming of the chieftain’ scene and the sacrifice and cannibalism sequence at the conclusion of the film.

Throughout Eaters there are references to the ‘bloody chieftain’, and the doomed anthropologists see from afar, but are forbidden from approaching, the red hut the chieftain dwells in. He is never seen to emerge from it, and the villagers laughed when asked what role he played in their day-to-day affairs. It was concluded that the ‘bloody chieftain’ was more akin to a witch-doctor. When we finally do meet him (played by an apparently very patient elder of the tribe), he is painted head-to-toe in red, and covered with the peculiar sigils Dobbs’ was so fixated on replicating accurately. He wears a strange headdress, and his stepping out of the hut is celebrated by mass ritual dancing and drumming.

What we can gather from the notes suggests that this scene in TGEM was far more disturbing than in Eaters. Dobbs decided to keep the ritual killings until the final scene, while in TGEM, the coming of the chieftain is a sacrificial rite. Dobbs says that the chieftain emerges from a cave, not a hut, and he uncomfortably describes the chieftain as ‘inhumanly tall, dark as tar’. This is where we see the first death in TGEM, where a ‘captive/offering’, presumably from another tribal community, is brought to the chieftain, who rapes, kills, and devours him. Dobbs is sketchy on the details here, simply noting: ‘unlikely to be able to convincingly reproduce the glowing’. Dobbs also curiously emphasises (making a use of racial slurs that I won’t reproduce) that the chieftain is black, but not a black man in the sense of being of African ancestry. The conclusion we reached is that the chieftain in TGEM is covered in black ritual make-up of some kind.

The reference to glowing leads us to think that Dobbs was obviously being duped. It strikes us as perfectly possible that TGEM is a genuine snuff film, but one where D’Amore used special effects to create an exotic, mystical atmosphere to heighten the drama. This becomes not only more obvious, but the only possible conclusion we can make based on what we can determine about the sacrifice scene.

In Eaters, the surviving three anthropologists are presented to the bloody chieftain. In a graphically violent and sexually explicit sequence, they are stripped, raped, tortured, and butchered and eaten alive, all during a bizarre religious ceremony where yet more of the odd symbols that Dobbs took from TGEM make an appearance, being carved into the flesh of the captives (Marcus Fields showed us the scar from where he volunteered to have one of them cut into his skin). The most unusual feature of this sequence, though, is that the ‘savages’ all dress in the guise of their various deities (as explained in some helpful exposition from Field’s character, Dr Oskar von Schwarz), assuming the identities of the divine, and shedding their own. They become their gods, and thus when they consume their captives, it is not them cannibalising their fellow human beings, it is the gods consuming the offering that has been brought to them: the gods eat men!

This was Dobbs’ attempt to capture the spirit of sacrifice scene in TGEM. The huge difference though is that Dobbs suggests that having the tribe assume the identity of their gods is ‘the closest I’ll get to having the gods appear’. It seems that in the film that inspired him, the tribe do not assume the identities of their deities. Rather, the bloody chieftain summons the deities and they appear literally. The appearance of the gods is another one of the special effects that Dobbs didn’t think he could recreate, hence having the tribe just dress up as them. The effects in question certainly sound curious: ‘interlocking spheres of light shifting through one another as the chieftain and his savages chant’. Dobbs did everything he could to have the costumes resemble the ‘gods’ that appeared in the original, and his sketches suggest they were truly horrifying. They bear little to no resemblance to any depictions of deities or spirits our research into indigenous religion in Polynesia discovered. There is something indefinably primal about them, almost totemic. For reasons we couldn’t deduce, we felt that they suggested extreme antiquity, and absolute otherness. They don’t look like the kinds of gods you’d expect human beings to imagine.

Given the possibility that The Gods Eat Men! is now lost except for private collections (and considering the very real possibility that human lives were lost in its production, it’s doubtful these will ever be distributed further legitimately), it seems that we’ll have to resign ourselves to simply not knowing if Dobbs was right about the nature of this film. It seems extraordinary that Dobbs could think that this film was anything other than a hoax, even if it was a murderous one. Although apparently legitimate symbolism from indigenous spiritual traditions in Polynesia was made use of by D’Amore, and it is even very possible that he had managed to locate a culture that was at least not averse to cannibalism, the lack of any reference in academic literature to deities of the form described in Dobbs’ notes suggests that many features of the film were D’Amore’s invention. The question is how much was sheer invention.

Of course, the description of strange special effects, ‘glowing’ and ‘spheres of light’, already discredit the possibility that TGEM was just a documentary. It seems that Dobbs’ mental collapse began earlier than had previously been thought. His obsession with this strange film, his conviction that it was genuine, as well as his insistent, detailed reproduction of its symbolism, all point to a mind that was beginning to break.

The final question is: why? Why did Dobbs make Eaters and try to tie it so closely to an underground, probable snuff film? The safest assumption is that Dobbs was simply a hack. He saw a film that impressed him greatly, and knowing that he could safely assume the audience would be unfamiliar with it, he simply copied from it. However, the great detail of his notes, his obsession with faithful reproduction of the symbolism, and his apparent appreciation of the skill in D’Amore’s direction, make another interpretation possible, namely that his imitation wasn’t simply cynical.

If Dobbs’ mind was indeed beginning to break, it seems likely that his obsession with The Gods Eat Men! had a traumatic dimension to it, and it is of course a sad truth that some victims of extreme trauma and abuse suffer from repetition compulsion, recreating their traumas and inflict the abuse they’ve suffered on others. Eaters, then, could be read as a huge acting out of the source of his trauma, D’Amore’s film.

Of course, this further begs the question: even if D’Amore’s film was a snuff film, what was it that Dobbs found so disturbing that he simply could not cope with it?

Without seeing it, it is impossible to know. However, we believe we may have isolated the moment that he began to break down. Consulting his notes, we find one dated to about a month before he began to raise finances for his film, and six months into his obsession with The Gods Eat Men!, simply saying: ‘It isn’t just a movie. Movies are never just movies. It isn’t make-believe.’

 

The post PseudoPod 530: The Madness of Bill Dobbs: A Tale of Snuff Movies and Cannibal Cults appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Mary Wilkins-Freeman
• Narrator : Julie Hoverson
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“Luella Miller” was first published in Everybody’s Magazine, December 1902.

Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.

YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.

Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.

In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.

This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you

Luella Miller by Mary Wilkins-Freeman

 

Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear.

There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine. She had never married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from Luella Miller’s.

This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance. When this old woman spoke—and she had the gift of description, although her thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village—one could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude.

“Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up and studied a week of Sundays,” said Lydia Anderson, “and it was a sight to see her walk. If one of them willows over there on the edge of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways, and a green ribbon flyin’ from her waist. That was what she came out bride in when she married Erastus Miller. Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of “l’s” in her name, married or single. Erastus Miller was good lookin’, too, better lookin’ than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wa’n’t so handsome after all. Erastus just about worshiped her. I used to know him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school together. Folks used to say he was waitin’ on me, but he wa’n’t. I never thought he was except once or twice when he said things that some girls might have suspected meant somethin’. That was before Luella came here to teach the district school. It was funny how she came to get it, for folks said she hadn’t any education, and that one of the big girls, Lottie Henderson, used to do all the teachin’ for her, while she sat back and did embroidery work on a cambric pocket-handkerchief. Lottie Henderson was a real smart girl, a splendid scholar, and she just set her eyes by Luella, as all the girls did. Lottie would have made a real smart woman, but she died when Luella had been here about a year—just faded away and died: nobody knew what ailed her. She dragged herself to that schoolhouse and helped Luella teach till the very last minute. The committee all knew how Luella didn’t do much of the work herself, but they winked at it. It wa’n’t long after Lottie died that Erastus married her. I always thought he hurried it up because she wa’n’t fit to teach. One of the big boys used to help her after Lottie died, but he hadn’t much government, and the school didn’t do very well, and Luella might have had to give it up, for the committee couldn’t have shut their eyes to things much longer. The boy that helped her was a real honest, innocent sort of fellow, and he was a good scholar, too. Folks said he overstudied, and that was the reason he was took crazy the year after Luella married, but I don’t know. And I don’t know what made Erastus Miller go into consumption of the blood the year after he was married: consumption wa’n’t in his family. He just grew weaker and weaker, and went almost bent double when he tried to wait on Luella, and he spoke feeble, like an old man. He worked terrible hard till the last trying to save up a little to leave Luella. I’ve seen him out in the worst storms on a wood-sled—he used to cut and sell wood—and he was hunched up on top lookin’ more dead than alive. Once I couldn’t stand it: I went over and helped him pitch some wood on the cart—I was always strong in my arms. I wouldn’t stop for all he told me to, and I guess he was glad enough for the help. That was only a week before he died. He fell on the kitchen floor while he was gettin’ breakfast. He always got the breakfast and let Luella lay abed. He did all the sweepin’ and the washin’ and the ironin’ and most of the cookin’. He couldn’t bear to have Luella lift her finger, and she let him do for her. She lived like a queen for all the work she did. She didn’t even do her sewin’. She said it made her shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus’s sister Lily used to do all her sewin’. She wa’n’t able to, either; she was never strong in her back, but she did it beautifully. She had to, to suit Luella, she was so dreadful particular. I never saw anythin’ like the fagottin’ and hemstitchin’ that Lily Miller did for Luella. She made all Luella’s weddin’ outfit, and that green silk dress, after Maria Babbit cut it. Maria she cut it for nothin’, and she did a lot more cuttin’ and fittin’ for nothin’ for Luella, too. Lily Miller went to live with Luella after Erastus died. She gave up her home, though she was real attached to it and wa’n’t a mite afraid to stay alone. She rented it and she went to live with Luella right away after the funeral.”

Then this old woman, Lydia Anderson, who remembered Luella Miller, would go on to relate the story of Lily Miller. It seemed that on the removal of Lily Miller to the house of her dead brother, to live with his widow, the village people first began to talk. This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone.

“The way Lily Miller used to talk about Luella was enough to make you mad and enough to make you cry,” said Lydia Anderson. “I’ve been in there sometimes toward the last when she was too feeble to cook and carried her some blanc-mange or custard—somethin’ I thought she might relish, and she’d thank me, and when I asked her how she was, say she felt better than she did yesterday, and asked me if I didn’t think she looked better, dreadful pitiful, and say poor Luella had an awful time takin’ care of her and doin’ the work—she wa’n’t strong enough to do anythin’—when all the time Luella wa’n’t liftin’ her finger and poor Lily didn’t get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin’ that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin’. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she’d go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever. But poor Aunt Abby begun to droop just the way Lily had, and I guess somebody wrote to her married daughter, Mrs. Sam Abbot, who lived in Barre, for she wrote her mother that she must leave right away and come and make her a visit, but Aunt Abby wouldn’t go. I can see her now. She was a real good-lookin’ woman, tall and large, with a big, square face and a high forehead that looked of itself kind of benevolent and good. She just tended out on Luella as if she had been a baby, and when her married daughter sent for her she wouldn’t stir one inch. She’d always thought a lot of her daughter, too, but she said Luella needed her and her married daughter didn’t. Her daughter kept writin’ and writin’, but it didn’t do any good. Finally she came, and when she saw how bad her mother looked, she broke down and cried and all but went on her knees to have her come away. She spoke her mind out to Luella, too. She told her that she’d killed her husband and everybody that had anythin’ to do with her, and she’d thank her to leave her mother alone. Luella went into hysterics, and Aunt Abby was so frightened that she called me after her daughter went. Mrs. Sam Abbot she went away fairly cryin’ out loud in the buggy, the neighbours heard her, and well she might, for she never saw her mother again alive. I went in that night when Aunt Abby called for me, standin’ in the door with her little green-checked shawl over her head. I can see her now. ‘Do come over here, Miss Anderson,’ she sung out, kind of gasping for breath. I didn’t stop for anythin’. I put over as fast as I could, and when I got there, there was Luella laughin’ and cryin’ all together, and Aunt Abby trying to hush her, and all the time she herself was white as a sheet and shakin’ so she could hardly stand. ‘For the land sakes, Mrs. Mixter,’ says I, ‘you look worse than she does. You ain’t fit to be up out of your bed.’

“‘Oh, there ain’t anythin’ the matter with me,’ says she. Then she went on talkin’ to Luella. ‘There, there, don’t, don’t, poor little lamb,’ says she. ‘Aunt Abby is here. She ain’t goin’ away and leave you. Don’t, poor little lamb.’

“‘Do leave her with me, Mrs. Mixter, and you get back to bed,’ says I, for Aunt Abby had been layin’ down considerable lately, though somehow she contrived to do the work.

“‘I’m well enough,’ says she. ‘Don’t you think she had better have the doctor, Miss Anderson?’

“‘The doctor,’ says I, ‘I think YOU had better have the doctor. I think you need him much worse than some folks I could mention.’ And I looked right straight at Luella Miller laughin’ and cryin’ and goin’ on as if she was the centre of all creation. All the time she was actin’ so—seemed as if she was too sick to sense anythin’—she was keepin’ a sharp lookout as to how we took it out of the corner of one eye. I see her. You could never cheat me about Luella Miller. Finally I got real mad and I run home and I got a bottle of valerian I had, and I poured some boilin’ hot water on a handful of catnip, and I mixed up that catnip tea with most half a wineglass of valerian, and I went with it over to Luella’s. I marched right up to Luella, a-holdin’ out of that cup, all smokin’. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘Luella Miller, ‘YOU SWALLER THIS!’

“‘What is—what is it, oh, what is it?’ she sort of screeches out. Then she goes off a-laughin’ enough to kill.

“‘Poor lamb, poor little lamb,’ says Aunt Abby, standin’ over her, all kind of tottery, and tryin’ to bathe her head with camphor.

“‘YOU SWALLER THIS RIGHT DOWN,’ says I. And I didn’t waste any ceremony. I just took hold of Luella Miller’s chin and I tipped her head back, and I caught her mouth open with laughin’, and I clapped that cup to her lips, and I fairly hollered at her: ‘Swaller, swaller, swaller!’ and she gulped it right down. She had to, and I guess it did her good. Anyhow, she stopped cryin’ and laughin’ and let me put her to bed, and she went to sleep like a baby inside of half an hour. That was more than poor Aunt Abby did. She lay awake all that night and I stayed with her, though she tried not to have me; said she wa’n’t sick enough for watchers. But I stayed, and I made some good cornmeal gruel and I fed her a teaspoon every little while all night long. It seemed to me as if she was jest dyin’ from bein’ all wore out. In the mornin’ as soon as it was light I run over to the Bisbees and sent Johnny Bisbee for the doctor. I told him to tell the doctor to hurry, and he come pretty quick. Poor Aunt Abby didn’t seem to know much of anythin’ when he got there. You couldn’t hardly tell she breathed, she was so used up. When the doctor had gone, Luella came into the room lookin’ like a baby in her ruffled nightgown. I can see her now. Her eyes were as blue and her face all pink and white like a blossom, and she looked at Aunt Abby in the bed sort of innocent and surprised. ‘Why,’ says she, ‘Aunt Abby ain’t got up yet?’

“‘No, she ain’t,’ says I, pretty short.

“‘I thought I didn’t smell the coffee,’ says Luella.

“‘Coffee,’ says I. ‘I guess if you have coffee this mornin’ you’ll make it yourself.’

“‘I never made the coffee in all my life,’ says she, dreadful astonished. ‘Erastus always made the coffee as long as he lived, and then Lily she made it, and then Aunt Abby made it. I don’t believe I CAN make the coffee, Miss Anderson.’

“‘You can make it or go without, jest as you please,’ says I.

“‘Ain’t Aunt Abby goin’ to get up?’ says she.

“‘I guess she won’t get up,’ says I, ‘sick as she is.’ I was gettin’ madder and madder. There was somethin’ about that little pink-and-white thing standin’ there and talkin’ about coffee, when she had killed so many better folks than she was, and had jest killed another, that made me feel ‘most as if I wished somebody would up and kill her before she had a chance to do any more harm.

“‘Is Aunt Abby sick?’ says Luella, as if she was sort of aggrieved and injured.

“‘Yes,’ says I, ‘she’s sick, and she’s goin’ to die, and then you’ll be left alone, and you’ll have to do for yourself and wait on yourself, or do without things.’ I don’t know but I was sort of hard, but it was the truth, and if I was any harder than Luella Miller had been I’ll give up. I ain’t never been sorry that I said it. Well, Luella, she up and had hysterics again at that, and I jest let her have ’em. All I did was to bundle her into the room on the other side of the entry where Aunt Abby couldn’t hear her, if she wa’n’t past it—I don’t know but she was—and set her down hard in a chair and told her not to come back into the other room, and she minded. She had her hysterics in there till she got tired. When she found out that nobody was comin’ to coddle her and do for her she stopped. At least I suppose she did. I had all I could do with poor Aunt Abby tryin’ to keep the breath of life in her. The doctor had told me that she was dreadful low, and give me some very strong medicine to give to her in drops real often, and told me real particular about the nourishment. Well, I did as he told me real faithful till she wa’n’t able to swaller any longer. Then I had her daughter sent for. I had begun to realize that she wouldn’t last any time at all. I hadn’t realized it before, though I spoke to Luella the way I did. The doctor he came, and Mrs. Sam Abbot, but when she got there it was too late; her mother was dead. Aunt Abby’s daughter just give one look at her mother layin’ there, then she turned sort of sharp and sudden and looked at me.

“‘Where is she?’ says she, and I knew she meant Luella.

“‘She’s out in the kitchen,’ says I. ‘She’s too nervous to see folks die. She’s afraid it will make her sick.’

“The Doctor he speaks up then. He was a young man. Old Doctor Park had died the year before, and this was a young fellow just out of college. ‘Mrs. Miller is not strong,’ says he, kind of severe, ‘and she is quite right in not agitating herself.’

“‘You are another, young man; she’s got her pretty claw on you,’ thinks I, but I didn’t say anythin’ to him. I just said over to Mrs. Sam Abbot that Luella was in the kitchen, and Mrs. Sam Abbot she went out there, and I went, too, and I never heard anythin’ like the way she talked to Luella Miller. I felt pretty hard to Luella myself, but this was more than I ever would have dared to say. Luella she was too scared to go into hysterics. She jest flopped. She seemed to jest shrink away to nothin’ in that kitchen chair, with Mrs. Sam Abbot standin’ over her and talkin’ and tellin’ her the truth. I guess the truth was most too much for her and no mistake, because Luella presently actually did faint away, and there wa’n’t any sham about it, the way I always suspected there was about them hysterics. She fainted dead away and we had to lay her flat on the floor, and the Doctor he came runnin’ out and he said somethin’ about a weak heart dreadful fierce to Mrs. Sam Abbot, but she wa’n’t a mite scared. She faced him jest as white as even Luella was layin’ there lookin’ like death and the Doctor feelin’ of her pulse.

“‘Weak heart,’ says she, ‘weak heart; weak fiddlesticks! There ain’t nothin’ weak about that woman. She’s got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills ’em. Weak? It was my poor mother that was weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her.’

“But the Doctor he didn’t pay much attention. He was bendin’ over Luella layin’ there with her yellow hair all streamin’ and her pretty pink-and-white face all pale, and her blue eyes like stars gone out, and he was holdin’ onto her hand and smoothin’ her forehead, and tellin’ me to get the brandy in Aunt Abby’s room, and I was sure as I wanted to be that Luella had got somebody else to hang onto, now Aunt Abby was gone, and I thought of poor Erastus Miller, and I sort of pitied the poor young Doctor, led away by a pretty face, and I made up my mind I’d see what I could do.

“I waited till Aunt Abby had been dead and buried about a month, and the Doctor was goin’ to see Luella steady and folks were beginnin’ to talk; then one evenin’, when I knew the Doctor had been called out of town and wouldn’t be round, I went over to Luella’s. I found her all dressed up in a blue muslin with white polka dots on it, and her hair curled jest as pretty, and there wa’n’t a young girl in the place could compare with her. There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of ME. She was settin’ rocking in the chair by her sittin’-room window, and Maria Brown had gone home. Maria Brown had been in to help her, or rather to do the work, for Luella wa’n’t helped when she didn’t do anythin’. Maria Brown was real capable and she didn’t have any ties; she wa’n’t married, and lived alone, so she’d offered. I couldn’t see why she should do the work any more than Luella; she wa’n’t any too strong; but she seemed to think she could and Luella seemed to think so, too, so she went over and did all the work—washed, and ironed, and baked, while Luella sat and rocked. Maria didn’t live long afterward. She began to fade away just the same fashion the others had. Well, she was warned, but she acted real mad when folks said anythin’: said Luella was a poor, abused woman, too delicate to help herself, and they’d ought to be ashamed, and if she died helpin’ them that couldn’t help themselves she would—and she did.

“‘I s’pose Maria has gone home,’ says I to Luella, when I had gone in and sat down opposite her.

“‘Yes, Maria went half an hour ago, after she had got supper and washed the dishes,’ says Luella, in her pretty way.

“‘I suppose she has got a lot of work to do in her own house to-night,’ says I, kind of bitter, but that was all thrown away on Luella Miller. It seemed to her right that other folks that wa’n’t any better able than she was herself should wait on her, and she couldn’t get it through her head that anybody should think it WA’N’T right.

“‘Yes,’ says Luella, real sweet and pretty, ‘yes, she said she had to do her washin’ to-night. She has let it go for a fortnight along of comin’ over here.’

“‘Why don’t she stay home and do her washin’ instead of comin’ over here and doin’ YOUR work, when you are just as well able, and enough sight more so, than she is to do it?’ says I.

“Then Luella she looked at me like a baby who has a rattle shook at it. She sort of laughed as innocent as you please. ‘Oh, I can’t do the work myself, Miss Anderson,’ says she. ‘I never did. Maria HAS to do it.’

“Then I spoke out: ‘Has to do it I’ says I. ‘Has to do it!’ She don’t have to do it, either. Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live on. She ain’t beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and kill herself.’

“Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin’ to life.

“‘Yes,’ says I, ‘she’s killin’ herself. She’s goin’ to die just the way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby. You’re killin’ her jest as you did them. I don’t know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse,’ says I. ‘You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and do for you.’

“She stared at me and she was pretty pale.

“‘And Maria ain’t the only one you’re goin’ to kill,’ says I. ‘You’re goin’ to kill Doctor Malcom before you’re done with him.’

“Then a red colour came flamin’ all over her face. ‘I ain’t goin’ to kill him, either,’ says she, and she begun to cry.

“‘Yes, you BE!’ says I. Then I spoke as I had never spoke before. You see, I felt it on account of Erastus. I told her that she hadn’t any business to think of another man after she’d been married to one that had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that’s true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it—if she wa’n’t like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without knowin’ what it was doin’.

“Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin’ and I went home. I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o’clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin’ past and sort of slowed up he see there wa’n’t any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of meetin’ the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn’t go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died—sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin’. Well, then there was a good deal of feelin’ and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn’t go there, and there wa’n’t anybody to do anythin’ for her. I don’t know how she DID get along. I wouldn’t go in there and offer to help her—not because I was afraid of dyin’ like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin’ other folks. But it wa’n’t very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin’ into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I used to see her goin’ past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and ‘tend when he couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn’t go out to help her.

“But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin’ up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.

“‘I’d offer to go in and nurse her,’ says she, ‘but I’ve got my children to consider, and mebbe it ain’t true what they say, but it’s queer how many folks that have done for her have died.’

“I didn’t say anythin’, but I considered how she had been Erastus’s wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in the next mornin’, unless she was better, and see what I could do; but the next mornin’ I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came steppin’ out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs. Babbit came in and told me that the Doctor had got a girl from out of town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure that the Doctor was goin’ to marry Luella.

“I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was true. The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a caution. I don’t believe Luella had swept since Maria died. She swept and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets were flyin’ over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out when the Doctor wa’n’t there there was that Sarah Jones helpin’ of her up and down the steps, as if she hadn’t learned to walk.

“Well, everybody knew that Luella and the Doctor were goin’ to be married, but it wa’n’t long before they began to talk about his lookin’ so poorly, jest as they had about the others; and they talked about Sarah Jones, too.

“Well, the Doctor did die, and he wanted to be married first, so as to leave what little he had to Luella, but he died before the minister could get there, and Sarah Jones died a week afterward.

“Well, that wound up everything for Luella Miller. Not another soul in the whole town would lift a finger for her. There got to be a sort of panic. Then she began to droop in good earnest. She used to have to go to the store herself, for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for her, and I’ve seen her goin’ past and stoppin’ every two or three steps to rest. Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her comin’ with her arms full and stoppin’ to lean against the Babbit fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her house. Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she called after me dreadful kind of pitiful. Well, that night I was taken sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks. Mrs. Babbit had seen me run out to help Luella and she came in and told me I was goin’ to die on account of it. I didn’t know whether I was or not, but I considered I had done right by Erastus’s wife.

“That last two weeks Luella she had a dreadful hard time, I guess. She was pretty sick, and as near as I could make out nobody dared go near her. I don’t know as she was really needin’ anythin’ very much, for there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her life.

“When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning. Mrs. Babbit had just come in to say she hadn’t seen any smoke and she didn’t know but it was somebody’s duty to go in, but she couldn’t help thinkin’ of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn’t been out of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was layin’ on the bed, and she was dyin’.

“She lasted all that day and into the night. But I sat there after the new doctor had gone away. Nobody else dared to go there. It was about midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine I had been takin’, for I begun to feel rather bad.

“It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to cross the street back to Luella’s, I stopped short, for I saw something.”

Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed voice:

“I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death bed that I saw it. I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily, and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin’ out of her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they were all helpin’ her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst of them. Then it all disappeared. I stood a minute with my heart poundin’, then I went over there. I thought of goin’ for Mrs. Babbit, but I thought she’d be afraid. So I went alone, though I knew what had happened. Luella was layin’ real peaceful, dead on her bed.”

This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale which has become folklore in the village.

Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven. She had continued wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks before her death.

One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her parlour when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house and across the street before the neighbour who was taking care of her could stop her. She followed as fast as possible and found Lydia Anderson stretched on the ground before the door of Luella Miller’s deserted house, and she was quite dead.

The next night there was a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground. Nothing is now left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might be considered emblematic of Luella herself.

The post PseudoPod 529: Luella Miller appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Aaron Fox-Lerner
• Narrator : Kenny Kinlund
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 528: Unsent Letter From An Unnamed Student is a PseudoPod original.

Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.

YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.

Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.

In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.

This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you

Unsent Letter from an Unnamed Student by Aaron Fox-Lerner

The first time you killed me was the scariest. Those large hands, holding me down until I breathed water and then nothing at all. Those hands that had previously stroked me and caressed me and ranged all over my body now shoving my head under the light ice on the pond, steadying me as my thrashing grew gradually more feeble.

A test of trust, you said, joking but not. To break the tension after our argument. I lay my head right by the water, and I even let you push it down, betrayed by the jocular smile on your face. It went on so long and became so hard to breathe and the water was so cold, but it wasn’t until I started to struggle and you refused to let me go that I realized I never should have trusted you at all, that was the test that I’d failed. That realization was the scariest part.

And after the enveloping terror and darkness, I came to in my bed early in the morning. Nothing wet, nothing cold, my roommate still asleep across the room. I thought it was a dream, a dream so powerful I had believed it to be real. I stayed that way, stalking disoriented through the school corridors until I came into your class at 10:30 and saw your face, looking as if you were the one who had been in the cold pond rather than me.

You do not hide guilt or surprise well, which is an unfortunate trait for a murderer. I’d previously thought of you as so unflappable. You were as uniquely stylish as ever, tight slacks and a powder blue blazer contrasting with your students’ bland uniforms, but everything else was off. Over the course of that class, I could see you change, your normal vituperative intellectual charisma gone, the other students exchanging silent, gossipy looks over your drained and distracted air. I was in the strange position of feeling that I simultaneously knew more and less than them. All I could do was look at you with mounting confusion and then uncertain dread. If your reaction meant what I thought it must, then the murder was no dream. And yet, nothing else was possible.

Here’s what I knew: there was no way, logically, that my drowning could have been real. People do not drown in cold ponds and then find themselves teleported into their beds the next morning. You should not have reacted to seeing me the way you did. Did we have some other fight I couldn’t remember? Did I simply invent the end to that night? Even if I had not truly died that night, it would still make no sense to me.

I was just as uncertain when you found me after the school day ended and asked if we could meet at our spot that evening. It’s funny how a feeling of disassociation can lead to greater clarity. My constant doubt came to feel like a lucid state. That unreal day, when I walked up to your cabin off school grounds, I had the obvious realization that I surely wasn’t the first boy you’d taken up there. That cabin you already had, perfectly placed and maintained but empty: no, I couldn’t have been the first boy you’d taken there. Nor was I likely to have been the first boy you’d invited to New York with you over the summer because he was just so cultured he needed to see some of the world’s greatest art while staying at your apartment, soft heavy steps coming into his room every night after visits to the Frick and Guggenheim and Whitney.

With the terror of the night before still a seeming impossibility in my mind, I only understood as I began the chilly walk up to that cabin, feet crunching over hard, crumbling early spring snow. Of course you played me, I was sixteen and you were a little more than twice that. I’d fancied myself the snake when I was really Eve. At the start, I’d even felt valued for having hooked up with you. After all, you weren’t just any teacher. You’d framed yourself as the most intellectually demanding at our already painfully elite boarding school, the young prodigy deigning to share his insight with the rest of us. You were the most popular here, too cool be considered simply a “cool teacher” (how you’d roll your eyes at the term!) You were the one who built a practical cult out of his intensive Honors Literature program, the one who had every wannabe writer and intellectual at our exclusive boarding school jostling to catch the attention of your alternately scabrous and rapturous passions.

What easy prey that must have made us. What easy prey I must have been especially, so scornful of my bland suburban background, so afraid that the “lower” part of my lower middle class upbringing would show. So desperate to seem a true cosmopolitan among the kids with vacations on Greek islands and no need for scholarships.

Is that what drove me into your cabin, what drove me to let you into my pants? Would I be taking that walk up to meet you one more time if I were tall and blond and had light skin and a summer house? I don’t think either possible answer would please me. To say no would be implying that I let my background determine me in ways that I decided it wouldn’t. To say yes would be giving you a degree of power I wouldn’t want to grant you. Regardless, there I was. Walking on the barely worn path up to your hideout (ours, I once called it). That cabin. Always so neatly turned out, clean but empty, nothing but a few chairs and the floor we had sex on. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that you were waiting at the cabin with an ax for my head, but I startled regardless.

I didn’t even get inside. The moment I turned the door handle, you came charging out, not knocking me over, just pushing me stiffly back. For once, you didn’t say anything, not a word, not even a sound. And there was that ax in your hands, swinging back and then toward me. And I raised my hands, but not fast enough. And right as the ax came to me, I had two simultaneous thoughts mixed with the flash of terror. The first: not again. The second: so it was real. My death was much faster the second time, almost instantaneous: you swung the blade, it hit me, and everything ended.

The murder was easy. It simply occurred. What followed was what scared me the most. Once again, I woke up in my bed the next morning. And you? What did you do in the meantime? What happened? Did anything? What could possibly have happened between my death and my awakening? Were there two of me? Two bodies? Did one come into being as the other disappeared? What did you do after? How did you sleep? How did I wake up?

And how did you feel the next day when you saw me again? You hid it better the second time, only stumbling slightly in your ecstasy over Hamlet, your eyes catching and dragging on me as you lay out the proto-postmodernist metatextuality of the play within the play. It’s too bad we’d already finished Death in Venice and Lolita, and I suppose Macbeth would have been even more fitting for dramatic irony, but what can you do?

I sat there in that class, watching you fumble just slightly, other students probably assuming you must be tired or simply going through an off day, and began, I will admit, to feel a sense of power. Now I knew that you really were unnerved. You were frightened. By me. I felt it as a kind of turnaround, seeing the fear you’d imposed so suddenly and horribly upon me now foisted back upon you. That vengeful pleasure helped me suppress, however unsuccessfully, the knowledge that if it had happened a second time and you truly were afraid, then it must also be real. The murders were now unquestionably fact.

Why was it that every time you murdered me, I came back? I certainly had no idea. It was this curiosity, more than anything else, that spurred me to stay after class. I had to know. And yet the minute it looked like you might be alone in a room with me, you fled out of it in a cold panic.

For you, I must have seemed to simply be a threat, albeit a frighteningly unreal one. For me, my very existence was an uncertain, petrifying limbo. I still don’t know what I am. If I’m a ghost, why does everything else in my life continue as normal? I eat, I sleep, I use the bathroom, I feel things, other people see me.

Do you want to know something odd, though? I had a scrape on my leg when you drowned me that first time. I’d gotten it earlier in the day during PE, ran into someone else’s cleat playing soccer. It never healed. It stayed exactly the same since you drowned me. It didn’t get worse, it didn’t get better, it just stays the same.

It was my curiosity that drove me to accept when you texted asking if I wanted to meet up and talk about things. It was pure thoughtlessness that led me to drink the coffee you offered me, though. I was so fixated on the physicality of my previous violent deaths that I accepted the cup without even noticing, until I was writhing and choking on the floor, your nervous, sweaty face peering down at me. Again, I thought. And afterward there were only more questions.

What happens after you kill me? What happens to my body? Do you have a bunch of my corpses all piled up in a ravine somewhere? Do they disappear once you’ve killed me, so that I can always reawaken in the same form? I have to come back like this, I have no choice in the matter. Why did you keep killing me when you must surely know that nothing changes as a result? Will I be able to grow up at all from this point? Will I be stuck with you? Will this end when you die, somehow? Am I supposed to drive you to your death? If I do, what happens to me?

When you tried to break up with me, you said it felt like I was stalking you. That wasn’t true. It was only after my third murder that I began to stalk you. All I wanted to do after you killed me was understand my situation – you of all people should have known how much I hated to feel ignorant – but I couldn’t get to you. You retreated from me in the halls, locked your door to me, sequestered yourself from all the students for fear of encountering me.

I’m sorry for burning down your car, by the way. Not sorry in the sense that I feel guilty for wronging you, but sorry that it proved so ineffective. I was hoping to create the fire as a distraction so I could sneak into your studio at the faculty housing and demand answers, but you made sure to stick with the other teachers the whole night. Safety in numbers, I suppose. Now I never see you anywhere but in public places surrounded by other people.

And then after weeks of waiting, once I finally did manage to catch you alone, stepping out of faculty housing at 3 am for a smoke, you killed me again. The minute I started to speak, you began bludgeoning me with a rock. Like the first two times you murdered me, there was something ferocious yet pathetic about it. It’s funny, when you bludgeoned me, I could hear you asking again and again: “Why are you doing this to me?” Yes, why am I doing this to you?

You must have hated the loss of control. That’s what I’ve decided these murders of yours must be, even though it seemed so deliberate when you pushed me under the pond. Now when I think back on it, I think of how angry you’d been when I said I would tell everyone about our relationship, your temper suddenly spiraling out at the idea that I would expose you. I think of how clearly you’d tried to regain your composure before suggesting the “trust exercise” only minutes later. More than any other teacher here, you exalted the life of the mind, and more than any other human being I’ve ever known, you’ve reverted to the animal.

Your attraction to me, or at least the fact that you acted upon it, must have been another loss of control. Do you hate yourself for what you’ve done? I couldn’t really know, but I imagine you do, with your long elegies to aesthetic appreciation for its own sake, your citing of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary on the essential meaninglessness of physical attraction. All that talk and you still find yourself a captive to base instinct: first sex, then violence. And it seems to be a habit you can’t break.

The next time I caught you alone took much more effort. I convinced the school I was heading back home to the west coast for spring break and convinced my parents I was staying at school, then took a Greyhound down to the city.

I knew where your apartment was from my previous visit, but you weren’t there when I arrived that afternoon. I sat down outside your door, waiting in the cramped, under-lit hallway for your arrival. You didn’t come back at all that night, your whereabouts yet another mystery for me. Eventually I dozed off and came to with you choking me furiously but silently in the early morning light.

The edges of my vision began to ease off, and my head was already throbbing from the moment I woke up with those big hands clenched around my neck, throat struggling feebly to pull down air against your thumbs. Not this time, I thought to myself, don’t let it be this time too.

I reached into my jacket for the thing I’d made sure to bring with me, smuggled all the way from our school’s cafeteria kitchen, a long knife wrapped in the folds of an old magazine. With both your hands wrapped around my neck, you didn’t stop my movements, but I still struggled to loosen the knife from the magazine taped around it. Finally I succeeded, my victory accompanied by the soft, understated sound of paper crumpling and falling. I hacked the knife against the back of your forearm.

You fell back with a single sharp yip! and I rushed to my feet, charging into and knocking you down a half-flight of stairs. You collapsed unevenly there at the bottom, and I staggered my way down the steps, gasping in deep, heavy breaths. I stood above you with the knife in my hand and realized this was the only course I had left. Maybe the only way to end our whole situation was to kill you in turn.

And yet as I leaned against the wall above you, ready to bring the knife down onto your cowering, tangled body, I couldn’t do it. I knew that I should, and yet I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but teeter there and eventually throw down the knife in front of you as if I had no other choice in the matter.

I’d begun my confused, disappointed walk down the stairs away from you when I felt a sharp pain in my back. There you were, with my knife, doing the thing you always did. It was another painful death. I couldn’t say how many times you stabbed me. Nor could I say how you got away with killing someone in a crowded apartment stairwell in the middle of New York, but you seem to have. Because the next thing I could remember was waking up at school once again on the first day back from break, you leading your class and everyone acting as if things were normal.

So here we are. I don’t want to be writing you this letter, but I have no choice. You seem increasingly tormented by the fact that I’m still following you – tracking you through the school, loitering by your office, waiting for you to leave the staff building. I’m only doing it because having failed to kill you, I can’t conceive of anything else to do. Every time I catch you in class or in the halls, I can discern a whimpering terror in your eyes before you slip away, and I know you see the hatred in mine.

I’m not angered that you’ve killed me and gone unpunished, or that you’re too much of a coward to face me. What really enrages me, what hurts me and drives me and spites me and pushes me further still after you relentlessly even against my will, is this idea that I’m the one haunting you, and not the other way around.

The post PseudoPod 528: Unsent Letter From An Unnamed Student appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : A.C. Wise
• Narrator : Siobhan Gallichan
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“We Are Not These Bodies, Strung Between the Stars” originally appeared in WHISPERS FROM ABYSS 2. This story is set in the same universe as Venice Burning, which was podcast on Pseudopod in 2013

Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.

YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.

Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.

In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.

This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you

by A.C. Wise

 

“I’m one of the ones who remembers what it was like before R’lyeh rose. Before New Orleans sank. Before Venice burned. When Mi Go first screamed through the space between the stars, and when Shoggoths last in the dooryard bloomed. For the record, it doesn’t make me one of the lucky ones.”

The post PseudoPod 527: We Are Not These Bodies, Strung Between The Stars appeared first on PseudoPod.

In our first 2017 metacast, for your consideration we present the Escape Artists stories that ran in 2016 which are eligible in the upcoming award nomination season.

A quick plug. For us. All four EA shows – PodCastle, Pseudopod, Escape Pod and Cast of Wonders – are themselves eligible in the SEMIPROZINE Hugo category. So is our eZine, Mothership Zeta.

Not Fancast. Not Fanzine. SEMIPROZINE. Yes, the categories are confusing and often overlap. “Fancast” is traditionally dominated by commentary shows and sketch-based audio programs.

There’s an argument that we could split the shows and compete in multiple categories to increase our chances. We don’t think that benefits anyone. The division is artificial at best, and extremely difficult (at worst) to explain, given all four of our shows have harmonised pay rates and submissions policies. It would smack of gamesmanship, which doesn’t interest us. This is what we did last year, and like our commitment to paying creatives, we stick to our commitments and are always pushing to expand.

Don’t get us wrong, we LOVED seeing PodCastle and Escape Pod on the Hugo long lists for the last two years, and we’d be honoured for any one of our shows to be a finalist.

But that’s a decision that rests solely in the hands of YOU, our fans and supporters.

Below are links to some aggregation projects, where fans are building lists of those eligible in the various categories. They’re great tools, and we’d like to thank David Steffen for his efforts. We’ll also link to our Wikia page, containing links to all the eligible Escape Artists stories.

• Escape Artists Stories eligible for Hugo Nomnations (2016)
• Hugo Nominees for Best Semi-prozine (2016)

Please listen to this MetaCast for all the Escape Artists entries!

The post For Your Consideration 2017: Original Fiction in 2016 appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Moaner T. Lawrence
• Narrator : John Bell
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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PseudoPod 526: The Great American Nightmare is a PseudoPod original.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” – Plato

“They who can give up essential liberty for temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

The Great American Nightmare by Moaner T. Lawrence

The sky over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was clear and blue at 12:00PM EST on Friday, January 20th, 2017. At 12:01, a fleet of Secret Service byakhee swarmed over the abstract visage of what was once The White House. Faster and faster, they beat their jet black wings, until the unholy force tore a hole in the sky. It became a swirling vortex, and the composer Erich Zann, considered missing for over 120 years, began conducting a chorus of six-foot albino penguins, alongside the United States Marine Band to a discordant rendition of Hail, Columbia. Opposite the band, a crowd of three million attendants held fast to a double-reinforced security railing, or anything else they could grab onto, so as to bear witness to the spectacle before them without being sucked into the portal forming above.

The post PseudoPod 526: The Great American Nightmare appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Ramsey Campbell
• Narrator : Paul S. Jenkins
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“Cold Print” first appeared in TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS in 1969.

by Ramsey Campbell

“GOOD BOOKS ON THE HIGHWAY provided shelter; he closed out the lashing sleet and stood taking stock. On the shelves the current titles showed their faces while the others turned their backs. Girls were giggling over comic Christmas cards; an unshaven man was swept in on a flake-edged blast and halted, staring around uneasily. Strutt clucked his tongue; tramps shouldn’t be allowed in bookshops to soil the books. Glancing sideways to observe whether the man would bend back the covers or break the spines, Strutt moved among the shelves, but could not find what he sought. Chatting with the cashier, however, was an assistant who had praised Last Exit to Brooklyn to him when he had bought it last week, and had listened patiently to a list of Strutt’s recent reading, though he had not seemed to recognize the titles. Strutt approached him and inquired ‘Hello—any more exciting books this week?’

The man faced him, puzzled. ‘Any more—?’

‘You know, books like this?’ Strutt held up his polythene bag to show the grey Ultimate Press cover of THE CANING-MASTER by Hector Q.

‘Ah, no. I don’t think we have.’ He tapped his lip. ‘Except — Jean Genet?’

‘Who? Oh, you mean Jennet. No, thanks, he’s dull as ditch-water.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

‘Oh.’ Strutt felt rebuffed. The man seemed not to recognize him, or perhaps he was pretending. Strutt had met his kind before and had them mutely patronize his reading. He scanned the shelves again, but no cover caught his eye. At the door he furtively unbuttoned his shirt to protect his book still further, and a hand fell on his arm. Lined with grime, the hand slid down to his and touched his bag. Strutt shook it off angrily and confronted the tramp.

‘Wait a minute!’ the man hissed. ‘Are you after more books like that? I know where we can get some.’ ”

The post PseudoPod 525: Cold Print appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Jarod K. Anderson, Karen Bovenmyer and Michael M. Rader
• Narrators : Jeremy Moran, Heather Simmons and Troy Volin
• Host : Dagny Paul
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 524: Flash on The Borderlands XXXV: The Kids Are All Wrong is a PseudoPod original.

Bells chime, I know I gotta get away And I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind

“Accident Report” first appeared in Midnight Echo Issue #11.

“What the Dollhouse Said” was originally published in Devilfish Review, Issue Ten, July 24, 2014 and it will be reprinted in a forthcoming issue of Jennifer Brozek’s Evil Girlfriend Media Shorts. This story was also accepted for illustration in Bonnie Stufflebeam’s 2015 Art & Words Show

“MeetWorks Daycare” is a PseudoPod Original

Accident Report by Jarod K. Anderson

I remember being worried about the cost of another citation. That’s why I made a complete stop at the corner of Deer Run and Milner Roads. My last ticket was over $300, and I was fresh out of second chances. Not just from the DMV.

If I had skipped that stop sign altogether, like I used to, or even settled for a rolling stop, maybe I wouldn’t have given the Devil a chance to get into the car.

But I obeyed the law and he got in. I watched him do it as I was looking both ways. He walked right out of the bushes and up to the passenger’s side door. My son, James, was in his car seat, playing with his stuffed stegosaurus and telling me why peanut butter was the best food of all. I could see his little blond head, nodding in agreement with himself, in the rear-view mirror. The door latch clicked and the Devil sank into the seat next to me like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was, I guess. James didn’t even stop talking.

You know ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones? That part about guessing his name? That’s complete bullshit. Nobody would have to guess. I knew who was walking up to the car the second I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I would have known it had I seen no more of him than a finger, a corner of his jacket, the toe of his shoe.

I don’t mean that he looked like the Devil. Not in the classic sense. No pointy goatee. No horns. He looked like somebody’s uncle who works in real estate. I just knew him. I knew him as well as I know my own reflection. The fact that I had never actually seen him before didn’t seem to matter.

No shock of fear went through me. I didn’t scream or scramble to grab James and run off down the street. Instead, impulse led me to nod to the man and ask how he’d been. The danger in his green eyes wasn’t like a cocked gun; it was more a thing of unchecked potential, like the feeling we have about our fathers when nothing seems to be too heavy or scary or complicated for them to handle – a complete and terrible faith.

“I know nobody trusts you anymore,” he said, fiddling with his seatbelt. “It wouldn’t matter how long you stayed sober. It wouldn’t matter if you had kept the job, or made it to daycare at 5:30 on the dot every damn day.”

The Devil leaned forward and rubbed at a coffee stain on the dashboard with his jacket sleeve. I think James was trying to tell me something about hot air balloons. It was hard to listen to them both. I tried to keep a neutral face, but I felt a lump growing in my throat.

“I don’t want to see you like this,” he said. He paused long enough to shoot a funny face over his shoulder to the back seat. I heard my boy giggle, like tinkling bottles, but I was looking away, trying to wipe my eyes without being noticed.

“Look at me, Son,” I heard the Devil say with commanding tenderness. As I turned, I noticed that James had stopped talking; he was staring up at the man with wide eyes. We both were.

The Devil raised his clenched fist and held it perfectly still in the center of the car. All three of us watched it, as if somebody had plucked something legendary from thin air and held it up in defiance of our drab little world.

“This is not your fault,” said the Devil in a child’s voice. Then, in one liquid motion, his fist shot towards James and stove in his chest like an empty can. There was a dull crunch and James’s bright head bowed forward like a prayer. When the Devil turned and embraced me, the scream that was welling up inside me died on my lips.

“The worst of it is over now,” the Devil whispered into my ear, stroking the back of my head. “You’ve been so very brave. You didn’t ask for any of this, and you’ve been so brave.”

I could hear a smile in his words, but there was no mockery in it. Not like the people afterwards. I couldn’t see my son’s face, just an unbroken line of blood, too bright and too red, like a wire running from his lap up to where his chin must have been.

I don’t know when I took my foot off the brake, or when we idled into the intersection. With the Devil cradling my head, my chin on his shoulder, it wasn’t hard to remember that he was supposed to have been an angel once. When I finally looked up and saw the truck coming, I remember leaning into the blow. Then everything was simpler, for a while.

What the Dollhouse Said by Karen Bovenmyer

Eleanor gets on the bus in uneven pigtails and a faded dress. Don’t sit by me, new girl, I think. Billy pokes me with a pencil, but sees her quick. Coyote boys always see what’s vulnerable and trembling, and she probably knows that, because she sits behind the driver.

Things we find out about Eleanor: a bunch of teenagers live in her house and she cries during Animal Kingdom because she has a pet rabbit named Ralphie. Coyotes can’t resist tears—they are merciless. I feel real sorry for Eleanor, even though she keeps them all, especially Billy, away from me.

She cries more than I think anyone can, at first, but she is the only kid who visits the dollhouse. I don’t know how it got there. It looks like it grew by accident in the root knuckles of a wide old apple tree on the edge of the playground. It smells strongly of cats, like my aunt’s house, and is white as antlers. It twists like grandma’s fingers, but the spines and knobs come together to make something that looks like a dollhouse just the same, with an open door, windows, and a steeple roof. There is always a small animal rotting there, tufts of fur missing.

At first, Eleanor seems scared of it like the rest of us. The coyote girls (they move in packs too) tell her she smells like Goodwill. The coyote boys throw gum or capless markers that leave black splotches on her clothes. She finds out quick that when the coyote boys are chasing her, they won’t come close to the dollhouse.

I feel sorry for her, watching her cower away from it, yet close enough to the dollhouse to keep back the coyotes. But, even in her apple-root circle, she is my shield. With her on the playground to taunt, I’m forgotten. They are held apart, Eleanor and the circling coyotes, but I know it won’t last. The apples grow red and heavy on the boughs, and coyotes are smart hunters.

She stops crying eventually. Even when Billy pulls the wings off a fly during times-tables, Eleanor doesn’t cry anymore. When he smashes it across her spelling test, she hands it in with guts smeared across d_e_f_i_n_a_t_e_l_y. Her face is stone.

She spends every recess at the dollhouse, closer and closer. I see her with her ear pressed against the open attic window, like it was telling her secrets. The coyote girls avoid her. Maybe coyote girls are smarter than coyote boys.

When the apples get big and start to fall, Billy sees how many bruises he can cause when the recess teacher isn’t looking. Since unafraid-Eleanor isn’t as much fun anymore, and, really, nobody is safe when the apples are ripe, I brace myself. When Billy nails somebody else in the face with an apple, the recess teacher takes a bloody nose to the nurse. No one’s surprised when Billy throws an apple at Eleanor. The other coyotes join the game and throw apples at her and the dollhouse, laughing.

Eleanor protects the dollhouse with her body. Apples pelt it and her with dull thuds. I think she’ll start crying again, but she doesn’t. The coyote boys run out of ammunition. Apples are scattered all around the dollhouse and Eleanor, and there are no more in reach of anybody else.

Eleanor stands up.

That look is only for the coyote boys. All the color flows down out of her face, like she is horn or bone. Her eyes and mouth look like the empty holes of the dollhouse.

Billy picks up a rock. The other coyotes pick up rocks too. I know Eleanor isn’t going to move or give in or duck. They are going to hit her with rocks while the teacher is gone.

I grab Billy’s wrist. “Stop,” I say.

He pushes me down. I cover my head, but Eleanor steps out from under the apple tree. She touches Billy’s shoulder, lifts up on her tiptoes, and whispers in his ear. Billy’s head tilts toward her, as if to hear her better. He makes a choking sound. Then he runs from her, tears on his cheeks, sobs floating in the air behind him.

The coyote boys look at each other. Eleanor looks at them, no expression at all on her blank-paper face. They drop the rocks and run. There is only me and Eleanor and a dead rabbit under the drooping apple boughs. She holds her doll-like hand out to me, white, empty, alone.

I take it.

The coyotes leave us alone now, Eleanor, and me. We never cry. We spend our time at the dollhouse, listening.

Meetworks Daycare by Michael M. Rader

We leave the children at the abattoir because it’s the only daycare center in Custer County. This is very convenient for the slaughterhouse-men in their white suits but less so for us. We leave, expecting the children to be skinned and slaughtered in our absence because we are pragmatic fatalists. This is the fear every parent has. You’ll understand when you have children. Of course, our children are unconcerned. The daughter merges into a frantic race across the killing floor and I hear their screams of naïve joy over the boom hum clank of the machines. I frown as the son plays with a set of dolls carved from unusable bones. Like every father, I do not want the boy to be a queer, you will understand this also when you are a parent.

We each go to our jobs. I am a television actor, but not a famous one. I am typecast as the small man who warns braver men not to do great deeds. I have grown a very thin mustache for this character, and I do it very well. I do not meant to brag, but this constitutes a significant percentage of our monthly income. The wife works at an abattoir in another state. Her abattoir competes directly with the one we leave our children at, which is part of why we are so afraid they will skin and slaughter our children. The matron of the daycare assured us that this will not happen, of course, but we can never fully escape our fears. This is the nature of being a parent.

Here is a tip, and it is a tip for new parents as well as old. Arrive at your child’s daycare during odd times. They will not abuse your child or the other children if they cannot predict when you will be there. We arrive 3 days later at 2:03 AM to collect our children. A single sodium light–the only illumination after miles of dark road–casts a bilious cone across the door. The sign for the daycare reads Meetworks with two ‘E’’s rather than an ‘E’ and an ‘A’ which is a play on an old homophone. We both agree this is very clever.

The slaughterhouse is half-lit, which we understand. We are not unreasonable, we know that half-light can save cost. We cannot find the childcare employees, but we hear their footsteps from far away. They must double as security guards at night because the crew is a skeleton one. Times are tight, so is money. I locate the sign-out book underneath a band saw. The wife finds our children’s backpacks behind the ammonia sink which, if you think about it, is the cleanest place in the abattoir. We find the son and the daughter in a pile of children who are huddling together for warmth. They are unclothed save for the wet animal skins draped around their bodies. They smell of ammonia. We unstick our children. The daughter grabs the hand of a very small girl from the pile and asks us if can take her new friend home. We agree that this is okay. My heart sinks when I see a jagged bone doll clutched in the son’s hand, wreathed in runnels of his blood.

As I get the children’s shoes on, I notice that the wife is examining the machinery and taking notes. Corporate espionage endangers our children, and I get very angry. I don’t yell though. I channel this anger into my artistic process. I think the small man who tells braver men not to do brave deeds has an undercurrent of anger that informs his decisions and his actions. I think he wants brave men to die, even though they never do.

We walk to the car as a family singing Row Row Row Your Boat. The new friend joins in easily, her voice blending and vanishing into the daughter’s voice as we sing in round. The sodium light shrinks behind us as we walk across the length of the fractured parking lot, stepping over the cracks and chasms of its surface. The parking lot is empty; I don’t know why we parked so far away. During the trip to the car, I force the son to throw his bone doll into one of the chasms. To be fair, I force the daughter to leave her new friend in the parking lot as well. They both cry, but I remind them to never hold onto the things from the places we have been. The wife nods at my wisdom and I incorporate this feeling of pride into my character.

We reach the car just as the sun rises to caress the white concrete of the abattoir with clean light. The sight of the imposing, industrial edifice takes my breath away. The parking lot is filling up as the slaughterhouse-men arrive with their children. We get into the car and I start it. The wife points at the clock and reminds me that we need to drop the children off at the daycare in just a few minutes. The wife points out that we are already late. I turn off the car and we unload the children. I pick up the son and the wife picks up the daughter and we run across the parking lot so we will not be late.

You’ll understand when you have children.

The post PseudoPod 524: Flash on The Borderlands XXXV: The Kids Are All Wrong appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Andrew Paul

 

Kashrut, or, the Ortolan is a Pseudopod Original.

Andrew Paul’s recent fiction work is included in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as the anthologies, “Mississippi Noir,” published by Akashic Books, and “Thuglit: Last Writes.” His nonfiction has been featured in numerous online and print publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Hazlitt, VICE Media, The A.V. Club, and Tablet. He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, and online at www.andrewpaulwrites.com and @anandypaul.

Your Narrator – Brian Lieberman is an associate editor of Pseudopod. By day, he’s a froody copywriter who always remembers his towel. By night, he fights various evils with his friends. He lives in Columbia, Maryland with his wife, a brooding rat, a roommate, a school of fish, and a cat with no patience for his tomfoolery. He asks that if you’re feeling particularly generous, you donate to a small project he’s quite fond of. You might have heard of it, it’s called Pseudopod.

Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found here.

“Compassion is what’s most important here,” Schulman tells his son.  

He shows him the sakin, turning it over in his hand, highlighting each angle.  

“The blade is sharpened again and again. There cannot be a single imperfection. Do you see?” Schulman asks.  

He lightly guides his youngest’s fingers across the metal edge. Jacob’s hesitance ebbs when he sees in his father’s care that there is no room for error, no chance of injury.  

“The sakin‘s edge is straight, not serrated. There can be no unnecessary tearing, just one precise and deliberate cut.”

Schulman motions to the heifer’s neck, pausing at every essential location along the knife’s route.  

“Esophagus. Trachea. Jugular. Carotids. Vagus,” he lists.  

Jacob swallows instinctively. Schulman nods. 

“It may seem excessive. But this ensures the slaughter to be as painless as possible. Compassion. That’s what’s most important.”

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