by Kelly Link

Read by Norm Sherman (of The Drabblecast)

Special Closing Music: “Just Mizunderstood” by Norm Sherman

Originally published in Magic for Beginners. Read the text here. (Reprinted from The Living Dead)

This is a story about being lost in the woods.

This guy Soap is at a party out in the suburbs. The thing you need to know about Soap is that he keeps a small framed oil painting in the trunk of his car. The painting is about the size of a paperback novel. Wherever Soap goes, this oil painting goes with him. But he leaves the painting in the trunk of his car, because you don’t walk around a party carrying a painting. People will think you’re weird.

Rated R: Contains Language, Thematic Elements

EDITORS’ NOTE: For some reason yet to be determined, we experienced some kind of issue with iTunes and other programs, resulting in an incomplete download (only Norm’s song). The entire download should be 62 minutes in length. We apologize and are trying to remedy it. Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE: Thanks to Ben, things seem to be back to normal now. Thanks again for your patience, and enjoy the story!

by Kris Dikeman

Read by Simon Meddings (of the Waffle-On podcast)

A PodCastle Original!

Bits and pieces of passengers and crew lay in untidy heaps along the deck. Picking my way through the remains of the unfortunate purser, I stepped to the railing. The setting sun threw the airship’s shadow across the water. Amid the rolling waves, the mermaids kept pace with us, gliding effortlessly in a perfect Q-formation.

“Regard,” I said to the gore-spattered robot, hoping to distract him from his murderous frenzy. “The zombie mermaids of the Undead Sea. The dirigible’s shape triggers the decayed synapses of their putrefied brains, awakening memories of the briny dill pickles they craved in life.”

Rated R: Contains Zombie Mermaids, Killer Robots, Dirigibles, and Cigars

by Deborah Kalin

Read by Rashida Smith

Originally Published in Postscripts

by Rachel Swirsky

Read by Elizabeth Green Musselman

Originally Published in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy

I am ugliness in body and bone, breath and heartbeat. I am muddy rocks and jagged scars snaking across salt-sown fields. I am insect larvae wriggling inside the great dead beasts into which they were born. Too, I am the hanks of dead flesh rotting. I am the ungrateful child’s sneer, the plague sore bursting, the swing of shadow beneath the gallows rope. Ugliness is my hands, my feet, my fingernails. Ugliness is my gaze, boring into you like a worm into rotting fruit.

Listen to me, my prince. Tomorrow, when dawn breaks and you stand in the chapel accepting your late father’s crown, your fate will be set. Do nothing and you will be dead by sundown. Your kingdom will be laid waste, its remnants preserved only in the bellies of carrion birds.

There is another option. Marry me.

Rated R: Contains Violence and Gore

By Greg van Eekhout

Read by Dave Thompson

Originally Printed in Starlight 3. Read the text at Ideomancer!

“Hey,” said my brother. “Down there.” Without waiting, he dove toward the sand where a dead Rotweiller rolled in the white foam. It had been a long flight and we were both ravenous. I angled in to follow, and soon we were absorbed in our feast.

A big gray gull challenged our salvage rights, screaming and beating us with his wings, but we tore him to shreds, ate him, then returned to the dog.

Later, my brother would be able to report every minute detail of the incident. He’d describe the precise markings on the gull’s bill, the way he favored his left foot over his right, the iron and salt taste of his blood.

But he wouldn’t be able to say why we’d killed him. He’s expert at the whats and whens and wheres, but he leaves the whys to me.

His name is Munin, Memory. I’m Hugin, Thought.

Rated R: Contains Violence and some gore.

by David J. Schwartz

Read by Elizabeth Green Musselmen

Originally published in Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy

The somnambulist brakes at the intersection of two suburban streets–Ivy Something Lane, Something Creek Road.  Her headlights illuminate the 2 A.M. silence.  She leans over to open the passenger side door and her husband, in the body of a grey squirrel, jumps in.  He’s been gone twelve days, in a double-door trap, in a coma, trekking across astral space and chemically treated lawns.  Earlier today his human body died.  The somnambulist cried herself to sleep; salt tracks have dried upon her face.

She pulls the door shut and sits up.  The squirrel-husband hops over to her, his tail arcing after him like an echo.  He climbs the arm of her teddy bear pajamas and perches upon her shoulder.

The somnambulist–her name is Judy when she’s awake–has been married for ten years.  Her husband calls himself a trader, and this is perhaps the best description of what he does, but he has been called other things; magician, sorcerer, devil.  Within the profession these terms have little meaning.  He traffics in power, which is more or less what Judy has always believed.

“The hospital,” says the squirrel-husband.  At least, she hears a voice, and the squirrel is the source.  The somnambulist turns towards the highway.

Rated R: Violence, Language, Adult Themes

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Read by Anna Schwind

Originally Published in Shimmer

The bearded Spaniard says little to her. He prefers to kiss her and mount her and have her pour his drink for him.

But the priests speak often, furiously. They show her drawings, they explain. The priests have images of martyrs drenched in blood, holding their own heads on a platter, their bodies pierced by arrows.

The priests make her kneel before their blessed Virgin and pray. She has prayed to others before and it is not so difficult to pray to new gods. It is more difficult to have lost her name. Even more difficult to have lost the jaguar shape.

But she does not remember much about those times either. It must have been years ago. She’s been the Spaniard’s mistress for an eternity. It has been like this forever, eating at his table, sleeping in his bed. Although it must not have been forever; she remembers there was a time when she could barely understand him and now his words are clearer although his meaning is the same.

Rated R for Violence, Including Gore

by Erin Cashier

Read by Dave Thompson

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I have always done as I have been told, and most of my actions have not been kind ones. I know because the Alchemist did not always tell me to forget and so, trapped inside my jar, I was cursed to remember.

I dreamt the dreams of dolls, and those were the times I could see the past most clearly. I remembered the time I crept inside a true man’s workplace to hide false evidence. And when I delivered a botched love potion into a poor serving girl’s tea and hid behind a jug of milk to watch as she retched black blood and green bile across the floor.

Tonight as I dreamt, I became aware that these were horrible things. They did not bother me at the time, and they do not bother me now, but I am aware of them in a way that I have never been before. And in the morning I realize one of my fingers is gone.

Rated R for Violence

by Hal Duncan

read by MarBelle of the Directors Notes podcast.

Originally published in Lone Star Stories

Flashjack had hauled himself up beside her on the rim of the wine-glass he was skinnydipping in, shaken Rioja off his wings, and looked around at the crystal forest of the table-top he’d, just a few short hours ago, been born above in a moment of sheer whimsy, plinking into existence at the clink of a flippant toast to find himself a-flutter in a wild world of molten multicolour— mandalas wheeling on the walls and ceiling, edges of every straight line in the room streaming like snakes.  He’d skittered between trailers of wildly gesticulating hands, gyred on updrafts of laughter, danced in flames of lighters held up to joints, and landed on the nose of a snow-leopard that was lounging in the shadows of a corner of vision.  He’d found it a comfy place to watch one of the guests perform an amazing card trick with a Jack of Hearts, so he’d still been hunkered there, gawping like a loon at the whirl of the party, and making little flames shoot out of his fingertips (because he could), when Pebbleskip came fluttering down to dance in the air in front of him.

“Nice to get out once in a while, eh?” she’d said.  “Hi, I’m Pebbleskip.”

“I’m… Flashjack,” he’d decided.  “What’s in a while?  Is it like upon a time?  And out of what?”

Her face had scrunched, her head tilted in curiosity.

“Ah,” she’d said.  “You must be new.”

Since then she’d been explaining.

Rated R for Foul-Mouthed Fairies and Ever-Shifting Landscapes

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By Holly Black

Read by Erik Luke (of the Extruding America podcast)

Originally published in The Poison Eaters & Other Stories

Each year, wolves are caught in traps or, very occasionally, a litter is discovered and they are brought to the city to die spectacularly. Arn wolves are striking, black and slim as demons, with the unsettling habit of watching the audience as they tear out the throats of their opponents. City dwellers are made to feel both uneasy and inviolable by the dog fights; the caged wolf might be terrible, but it is caged. And the dog fights are majestic tented affairs, with the best bred dogs from all parts of the world as challengers. Expensive and exotic foods perfume the air, lulling one into the sense that danger is just another alluring spice.

Not to be outdone by his subjects, the king of Dunbardain obtained his own wolf pup and has trained it to be his constant companion. He calls it Elienad. It is quite a coup to have one, not unlike making the son of a great foreign lord one’s slave. The wolf has very nice manners, too. He rests beneath the king’s table, eats scraps of food daintily from the king’s hand, and lets the ladies of the court ruffle his thick, black fur.

Rated R For Wolves in the Fold, No Matter Their Manners