Rated PG.

Teeth:

“I am no witch,” Gretel said, but she was too much in the dreamy stage to be properly annoyed.

Frankie watched, open-mouthed, as the cats soared up into the sky.

Frankie gaped at the spectacle of cats dotting the sky like a flock of
migrating birds. As the felines swarmed through the air, he glimpsed a
familiar gray leg. By instinct, he reached up to grab the striped
appendage, just as he might have done to spare the china. The skinny
leg jerked taut, and he found himself looking up into the startled
blue eyes of his Maurice.

Rated G.

That’s when she saw the balloon.

Rated PG.

Read by Dave Thompson

Originally published in Intergalactic Medicine Show.

I let her see my fangs.

The princess dropped the box-cutter.  She had just cut herself—shallow slashes that cried tiny, scarlet pearls.  Her blood smelled as sweet as cotton candy, but it was the scent of her destiny that had led me to her.  Spicy and cloying, the princess’s destiny made my mouth water, set an itch and tingle in my skin.  I inhaled it and let the city, with its bloated trash bags and filthy humans and miles of steaming asphalt, fade, fade, fade into the darkness.  The princess’s destiny was like Christmas morning: cloves and oranges, nutmeg explosions and cinnamon arias.  All bright; all clean.  A song in my sinuses, on the back of my throat, as pure as a child’s kiss, as sweet cream.

I bumped my nose against the window.  The twinge of pain brought me back to reality.  The city, the humans, the asphalt, all that.  And more, now: the stench of the princess’s mother downstairs, sucking on vodka and painkillers, stinking of booze and vomit.  

The window wasn’t locked; I rubbed my nose with one hand and opened it with the other. “Hello, princess,” I said.

Rated R: Contains violence and some drug references.

“Silly Billy, The Sailor King,” some called King William IV of Great Britain. But never, of course, to his royal face. Then it was always,“Yes, sire,” and, “As your majesty wishes!”

He leaned out the window. “Or on a day of doldrums and no wind in the sails,” he roared as if she was up in a crow’s nest, his face red as semi-rare roast beef. “You’ll be the monarch and damn all who’d say you no.”

Rated PG.

Special thanks to M.K. Hobson – our Guest Editor and Host this week!

Your Grace:
I believe you are correct. Tomaso Dellaforte is the most dangerous man I have ever met.
I followed your instructions to the letter. Your information as to the whereabouts of the condottiere de Mortibus was accurate. It was with very little difficulty that I purchased the inn, and as a matter of goodwill, I was careful to retain all of the long-term tenants. De Mortibus lived in a room on the upper floor, and made a poor living as a teacher of weapons. I had expected more from the man who led the sack of Mallorze.
I allowed the passage of a month, in order to allay suspicion, before I began to administer the draft. Once again, I congratulate you on the accuracy of your information. Administered in wine, in precisely the proportions ordered, the poison produced in the man every symptom of a most terrible, wasting illness.
Though he had little money, to my alarm de Mortibus was afforded a chirurge by a patron: an old friend, I believe. I did not manage to ascertain who it may have been. In any case the chirurge professed himself puzzled, and bled the man profusely, to no avail. Indeed, I suspect his ministrations were responsible for a sharp decline in de Mortibus’ condition, and I was forced to reduce the proportion of the draft in the wine for a time. De Mortibus continued to fail.
Perhaps two months after I began this work upon him, de Mortibus confronted me in the kitchens. By this time he was much weakened, and could get about only with great effort. He had not been able to pursue his livelihood for some time, and had come to depend upon my charity, as I had planned. Therefore, something of trust and familiarity had grown between us, and I was not surprised when he sought me out alone.
“Take this, good Marotti,” he said to me, and pressed a sealed packet into my hand. “I beg you see it delivered to the hand of Konrad Heisenck, whose Free Company you will find in the city square this month. There is no other I may entrust with it, and I swear to you that it means more than my very life.” He forced the packet upon me, and even produced a gold coin which I made much
play of refusing. I promised his letter would be delivered, and sent him to his bed with a stoup of hot wine.

This episode was not rated by PodCastle staff.

Special thanks to Marguerite Kenner and Graeme Dunlop – our Guest Editors and Hosts this week! Their own podcast is the YA oriented Cast of Wonders.

Violet Spinks checked her to-do list for the ceremony: canoe, plants, medicine cap, trails. List-making might not be traditional, but no one would blame her for needing a brain prompt. She set the list in her medicine book and picked up the TV remote. She clicked through the channels and stopped when she spotted a young man with a torso like polished bronze. He shook out a bundle of black rubber cables and attached them to a shiny disk. The camera zoomed in on his brawny arms and legs as they worked the cables with the disk spinning in the middle. He looked like he wrestled a spider. A notice on the screen said three easy payments of $14.99 plus tax and shipping.

Rated PG.

Special thanks to Tina Connolly – our Guest Editor and Host this week! Her own podcast is Toasted Cake.

Read by Dave Robison (of the Round Table Podcast)

Originally published as a Kindle eBook.

Perhaps the greatest warrior the world had ever known was entombed in a brown cardboard box in the attic. The box was scrawled “Kenny’s Room” in bright red Sharpie pen and stuffed into a dust-covered corner one Spring-cleaning with several others. Some contained toys the children had outgrown, others contained electronics that were working but hopelessly out-of-date. All of them were quickly forgotten about.

Inside the cardboard box filled with other unwanted toys, Sundae lay in his miniature steamer trunk. The trunk’s once-fine leather was cracked and peeling all over, its many stamps painted with their images of post card lands dulled and faded by age. Sundae himself had not faired much better through the years (it had been almost a century since he was created in Magda’s workshop).

One of his eyes was missing, and the tear left by its departure had been sewn shut to keep the fluff from leaking out. A large patch of fur covering his right breast and shoulder was dark and brittle. He’d taken a tumble into a roaring fireplace while grappling with a particularly nasty beast back in the 70’s. The cover he’d fashioned from leather scraps for his left ear, to protect the pressed metal button that was the source of all Stenz bears’ power, looked worn and awkwardly stapled on.

There were other punctures and tears and rips. Some had been sewn like his eye, some closed hastily with masking tape that was now brown and furling at the corners.

Rated R: Contains violent Teddy Bears. Been a while since we did that!

Special thanks to Alasdair Stuart – our Guest Editor and Host this week!

Read by Amanda Fitzwater

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it here!

For two weeks after she moved into our house, no one could convince me
that Aunt Victoria was not a ghost. With soundless steps, she drifted
from room to room in a dress the same blue-gray color as the pendant
around her neck.  When she cried, I heard nothing.  Once, as Mother
tried to calm her, Aunt Victoria opened her mouth as if screaming and
broke a plate against the wall.  There was no sound from the glass
until it hit the floor.

It was ten days past her coming-of-age ceremony when she came to live
with us, after a week of urgent telegrams and hushed dining room
conversations between Mother and Aunt Lily.  This _was_ a boarding
house, Aunt Lily pointed out, and Victoria would take up one of the
rooms without paying rent.

Aunt Victoria was bad for business.  In the early days, more than
once, we would find her in a room with a knife, hacking desperately at
the ribbon around her throat. It never took the slightest damage,
though Aunt Victoria managed to cut her fingers more than once.  Other
times, she would stand at her window and stare out, causing more than
one potential boarder to start at the eerie sight and promptly take
themselves over to the less-respectable Mrs. Harper’s.  I hid behind
Mother’s skirts when Aunt Victoria came into the room.  I remember
wishing that I, too, could move in with Mrs. Harper.

Rated PG.

Translated by Edward Gauvin

Read by Marguerite Croft

Originally Published in Tales and Legends of Belgium Illustrated by Naive Painters. This translation originally appeared in Scheherezade’s Bequest #15.

Many years ago there was a small fisherman’s house on the dunes of La Panne. Rik-the-Fisherman’s wife Marie sat at the window all day long, spinning thread as she watched the sea. She was tall and thin with a tanned face and blond hair, and her eyes, from watching the sea, took on the color of the waters: blue when it was fair, green when it was cloudy, and black when there was a storm. Now, one day when Marie’s eyes were black, one stormy day, the fishing boat sank and Rik was never seen again. Marie was so sad that her eyes stayed black. As the sea reminded her of her husband, she changed places and sat at the other window, which looked out on the Abbey of the Dunes.

Two months after Rik’s death, a little girl was born in the little house. Marie called her Rika, in memory of her father. Rika grew. She always played alone in the dune and on the beach, for her mother spun from dawn till dusk to provide for them. One evening (Rika had just turned six), Mari began to weep. She wasn’t earning enough money spinning and there wasn’t anything left in the house to ea. She told Rika to go out the next day and keep watch over the sheep for the monks of the Abbey of the Dunes. The monks would surely give her a big jug of milk each day for her trouble.

But Rika replied that she would rather go to the beach. Sometimes the sea tossed up precious objects she would gather and sell.

And so it was decided.

Rated PG. No, Really.

Special thanks to our friend Mr. Wilson Fowlie for guest-hosting this episode!

So here I am again, sitting at a twelve-person steel table, going through the motions. The Society of Supercriminals’ new headquarters is impressive but not comfortable. You’d think that Overlord, with his ill-gotten dictator-industrialist billions, could afford some padding for these damn chairs. But as my Tío Cesar would say, assholes never shit flowers.

Rated R for language and hostility

Read by Elizabeth Green Musselman

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it here!

In the city of Jiun-Shi the third shift was known as the goblin watch, but some of us were not very watchful. I, for one, was so absorbed in the daily details of living a lie that it took me three months to learn that one of the regulars at the Silver Fish Teahouse was a goblin. By the time our paths collided three years later, I had been promoted to third-shift manager, and my lie had been promoted to widely established fact.

Often during my shift I furtively watched him where he sat in his guise as a human poet and scribe-for-hire. Sometimes he was alone, his narrow shoulders slumped over a crisp rectangle of paper, his fine writing brush held in his gaunt left hand. Usually there were women at his table asserting their dominance, half-offended and half-fascinated that a man would bother to educate himself so thoroughly. To their credit, he looked the part of that second-class citizen of the Empire of Ru, the human male. But I—a liar smug in my knowledge of another’s truth—pitied those women who approached him in ignorance and waded in out of their depth.

He always remained tranquil, even as suitors playfully mocked him and threaded their fingers through his bird’s-nest hair. His sharp indigo eyes were always open, even when a woman leaned in to kiss his mouth. He never corrected those who treated him as a common plaything, but without fail a more experienced patron would whisper the secret into her sister’s ear just slightly too late to keep the poor woman from becoming infatuated.

Rated R. Contains sex.

They said the Marielitas were escoria – scum. The abuelitas muttered it to each other, and the young girls coming home from school clustered together like butterflies, looking thrilled and worried whenever the wind whistled at them. The newspapers said Miami was under siege, that Castro had loosed the worst from the Cuban prisons and madhouses.

What I was worried about wasn’t human.

Rated R for language and violence.

What does science fantasy mean to us? Here are some basic ideas.

Dragons in space! Magic on a dying earth! Fantastical forests on the moon! Sorcerers on spaceships!

And, you know, everything in between.

BUT ABSOLUTELY NO MIDICHLORIANS!!!

Send them to us at submit@podcastle.org as you normally would, but mark the title of your submission “SF Submission: Story Title”. Aside from that, follow our standard guidelines on how to submit.

Thanks, and looking forward to reading them!

Read by Graeme Dunlop (of Cast of Wonders)

Originally published in Strange Horizons. Read it here!

I am never the first to know the demons have returned.

This time, I am at Ukaya’s house, trimming the hooves of her goats, because her joints are too swollen and stiff to wield a knife. The morning sun prickles my back and rough goat hair prickles my belly as I whittle off thin curls of hoof.

Ukaya tells me stories about my late father, who climbed a mountain at fifteen, and went on to sail foreign ships, dive for pearls, slay monsters, and rout a nest of bandits just to bring my mother back her wedding jewelry, all before I was born. At least, I think to myself, someone in our family made himself remarkable before he died.

Rated R. Contains some disturbing imagery.

Read by Tatiana Gomberg

Originally published in Strange Horizons. Read the story here!

Making friends with Ginevra was like taming a stray cat. First I started hanging around in areas where she might be found. If she showed, I didn’t approach her. I just stood there, smoking, or I read something, glancing at her secretly from behind my hair. Then I started catching her eye once in a while. Then I started smiling.

Then I started dating Christopher Potter; I dumped him after a few weeks, but that got me introduced to Pete Janaczek, which got me the invite to Pete’s party, which got me in the same room as Ginevra while she was tipsy and expansive, and then-finally-it happened.

All that was a lie, you know. As if I could plan anything like that. It’s only in hindsight that I realize why I started spending time in the smoke-hole in the first place. So many of the things we do, we keep from ourselves.

Rated PG.

Read by Stephanie Morris

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it here!

A girl sits cross-legged in the dirt before the unlit pyre, her face dotted with yellow clay and her dark hair unbound. The girl has just seen her ninth summer. The man on the pyre is her father. The old woman at her side, bent and gray, is no relation.

The girl does not cry. She looks at the pyre with coal-bright eyes, her jaw set, her fists clenched. The pyre is covered in the flowers of the season: purple, blue, and yellow. Their scent is carried on the breeze. She fidgets with the curled edge of her tunic as the aurochs horn sounds in mourning, and she knows she will never enjoy the scent of summer flowers again.

The three of them—the girl, the old woman, and the corpse—sit in silence while the sun traces its slow arc across the sky. The girl knows that this silence is expected of her. She is satisfied with it, because if she is not silent then she will scream. She does not know the right word for the anger she feels, the rage and wanting in her heart that threatens to burst from her chest and lay waste the entire settlement and everyone in it, seek out the men who ambushed and murdered her father. There is a word for it, but it is taboo to her people, and never expressed.

If she knew the right word, she would say that what she wants is vengeance.

Rated R. Contains violence and disturbing imagery.

Read by Rajan Khanna

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it here!

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, the best ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat, was weary. Two and a half bars of thousand-sheet pastry sat on his plate, their honey and pistachio glazed layers glistening in the sunlight that streamed into Yehyeh’s teahouse. Adoulla let out a belch. Only two hours awake. Only partway through my pastry and cardamom tea, and already a panicked man stands chattering to me about a monster! God help me.

He brushed green and gold pastry bits from his fingers onto his spotless kaftan. Magically, the crumbs and honey-spots slid from his garment to the floor, leaving no stain. The kaftan was as white as the moon. Its folds seemed to go on forever, much like the man sitting before him.

“That hissing! I’m telling you, I didn’t mean to leave her. But by God, I was so scared!” Hafi, the younger cousin of Adoulla’s dear friend Yehyeh, had said “I’m telling you” twelve times already. Repetition helped folk talk away their fear, so Adoulla had let the man go on for a while. He had heard the story thrice now, listening for the inconsistencies fear introduces to memories– even honest men’s memories.

Adoulla knew some of what he faced. A water ghul had abducted Hafi’s wife, dragging her toward a red riverboat with eyes painted on its prow. Adoulla didn’t need to hear any more from Hafi. What he needed was more tea. But there was no time.

Rated PG.

Dave and Anna hear from PodCastle pal Tina Connolly about her debut novel Ironskin, and discuss Evil Fairies, Jane Eyre, and ANGER. (Anna is ALWAYS angry.)

Visit Tina Connolly online, and definitely check out her flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake!

Read by Tina Connolly (of Toasted Cake)

Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine. Read the story here!

The usual bidders were there, of course: Dame Eleanor in her sensible pantsuit, Miss Hawes and Miss Singh in their black leather jackets, the full brocade skirts of Mrs. Perriwhite. For whatever reason, we women have always made up the majority of phoenix egg collectors, and nowadays we did not have to send male proxies to do our bidding for us; now we could cordially hate each other directly.

There were other women, less serious than we five, and three men in the auction room: the auction house manager, Mr. Samoilenko himself, and John Weadsleigh. John was one of us, and we accorded him the respect of cordially hating him without regard to his gender. Even Miss Hawes, whom I suspect of hating men in general, did John the courtesy of hating him individually, as a competitor for phoenix eggs rather than as a man, which may be the most generous thing I have ever known her to do.

This was not a situation that encouraged generosity.

Rated PG.

Find out more about Lakeside, the Jay Lake documentary, here.

Find out more about You Caring’s Sequence a Science Fiction Writer here.

Read by Eric Luke (check out his new podiobook Interference!)

Originally published in Space and Time.

“Please lend me your second copy of the _Chronicles_, O magnanimous lord of bound volumes,” cried the scholar standing in the street.

Endart Sscowth, the most prosperous bookseller in all Samech Tern, and by that token in the whole of Hyposudia, was startled from his reverie by the reedy voice.  His ruminations, as he walked homeward that evening, had been lavish with the parchment scent of antique books, the supple smoothness of age-worn buckram, and the vivid hues of many-lettered spines in piles, stacks, and teetering columns, all atop the bookshelves of Endart Sscowth.  Now this scholar had chased that vision from his mind.

“Your pardon, but I ceased lending my treasures long ago, after too many were returned with dents and creases.”

“Then I offer to buy it, O generous one.”

Rated PG.

Read by TCA Lakshmi Narasimhan

Originally published in Cicada.

There was once a tiger in Mumbai, a Kshatriya and a ruthless trader of
stocks, who lived in a glossy high-rise the color of the sea. His
suits of slick poplin and seersucker were confected by two tailors in
Milan; his bath was cut from marble as rich as soap, and always drawn
warm and fragrant for him at the end of each day; and his suppers,
which threw the meat markets into an uproar, were prepared under the
hands of some of the finest cooks from Mangalore and Chengdu. He had,
in short, the kind of life that any well-bred tiger could hope to
have. But he lacked one thing, and it made him pace between the red
walls of his living room and bite the pads of his paws.

He went to the house of an old friend, where he and his trading tips
were always welcome, and said, “Brother, I have no mother or father to
help me in this matter, and no family except my friends. For the sake
of the tricks we played in school, for the beatings I took for you,
will you help me find a bride?”

Rated G.

Read by Ann Leckie

Originally Published at Tor.com. Read it here!

I began turning into wind the moment that you promised me to Artemis.

Before I woke, I lost the flavor of rancid oil and the shade of green that flushes new leaves. They slipped from me, and became gentle breezes that would later weave themselves into the strength of my gale. Between the first and second beats of my lashes, I also lost the grunt of goats being led to slaughter, and the roughness of wool against calloused fingertips, and the scent of figs simmering in honey wine.

Around me, the other palace girls slept fitfully, tossing and grumbling through the dry summer heat. I stumbled to my feet and fled down the corridor, my footsteps falling smooth against the cool, painted clay. As I walked, the sensation of the floor blew away from me, too. It was as if I stood on nothing.

I forgot the way to my mother’s rooms. I decided to visit Orestes instead. I also forgot how to find him. I paced bright corridors, searching. A male servant saw me, and woke a male slave, who woke a female slave, who roused herself and approached me, bleary-eyed, mumbling. “What’s wrong, Lady Iphigenia? What do you require?”

I had no answers.

Rated R: Contains Violence.

Read by Wilson Fowlie (of the Maple Leaf Singers)

Originally Published in Bourbon Penn. Read it here.

Never explore a cave alone like I just did. Here at the entrance, the roof domes high in the weak light, but at the back you’ll see it starts to narrow. I just went half a mile in.

I found a crack in the back, wide enough to squeeze through if I turn sideways and hold my breath. I stood at the maw and waited for a while, listening, waiting for my breathing to quiet. At last I turned the flashlight off.

And in the dark I heard it, faintly, far back there. The chanting. It fades in and out though the passages inside the mountain. Because they are on the move; they are always on the move.

I’ve found them. I’ve found her.

Rated PG, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Read by Laura Hobbs

Originally published in Interzone. Check out the awesome art work Hobson mentioned here.

Dreams tell you what you really believe, deep down.  But sometimes it takes a while before you understand them.

“When I climbed the hill of bones, the shaman was waiting for me,” Darren said, stirring Nutrasweet into his herbal tea.  “Except now he was a giant rat.  Like ten feet tall.”

Darren’s always told me about his dreams.  Ever since he quit his office job to write comic books full time, his dreams have gotten weirder.  I figure he’s really dreaming about how to pay the rent next month, though I can’t see what the giant rat has to do with anything.  I was probably more worried about Darren’s rent than he was, even though we weren’t roommates anymore.

Around us, the coffeeshop was nearly empty.  We sat at our usual table–the four-seater with room for my wheelchair.  Darren’s backpack and bike helmet occupied the extra chair.  The late-September sunlight stretched through the window like it wasn’t ready to leave.  I asked, “So did the rat-shaman have the sword ready for you like he’d promised?”

Rated R: Contains some strong language.

Read by Big Anklevich, of the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine

A PodCastle Original!

Pretty much nobody knows how, exactly, the Christmas Spirit started to spread. One theory goes that a child in Meridian Mississippi was bitten by an infected reindeer, and then spread the plague at her school Christmas pageant, where it jumped to a couple of long-haul truckers who hit the interstate on Boxing Day and took the condition nationwide. One epidemiologist is convinced it’s a prion disease, like Mad Cow, spread through tainted Christmas hams. I saw a neurologist on TV who believes it’s a brain disorder brought on by heavy metal poisoning, spread through tainted high-fructose corn syrup in the candy cane supply, and I met a man in a bar who drunkenly explained that it’s caused by an insidious parasite that lives in evergreen trees. And of course we’ve all heard the right-wing pundits screaming their conviction that the Christmas Spirit is a biological weapon invented by radical Kenyan socialists to force redistribution of wealth.

They’re all wrong. I know the truth about the Christmas Spirit, and how it started to spread. In a way, I’m the reason for the season.

Rated R. Contains some adult themes, and drug use.

Read by Brian Rollins

Originally published in The View From Here. You can read it at The Front View.

At the top of the Greenbriar Building, in Brooklyn, a girl has been sleeping for a hundred years. In fact, she may have been sleeping longer. But the Greenbriar was built a hundred years ago, and the room in which she sleeps was walled off and hidden, and ivy tangled its way up the sides of the building until even the window was lost. She would likely sleep there still, except that Rick wanted to know why his apartment was a hundred and fifty square feet too small.

It was a nice apartment– it had a breakfast nook, and a washer/dryer combo, and floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves in the living room and at the end of the hall. Rick liked it a lot. The building had never been renovated, not really, except to split the apartments up into smaller studios and one-bedrooms and to replace the stove and fridge. There were weird poky corners and weathered wooden floors and ornate brass fittings everywhere; Rick’s bathroom contained a massive claw-foot tub that, when she saw it, made Angela say “Oh, my God, no fair.”

Rated R, for an f-bomb or two, but really, it’s a sweet story.

Read by John Michnya

Originally published on the 42scifi-fantasy.com blog

There is a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and it’s never open. Its windows are covered in a thick film of dust and spiders grow webbed cities in its darkness. There are books inside that no-one’s ever read; books that human eyes had never seen, books where black ink spells secrets on black paper, books written in darkness that cannot be read in the light.

Rated PG.

John came to the crossroads at just shy of noon, where a man dressed all in black stared up at another man hanging from a gallows-tree. No, not hanging; he was being hung, the loop still slack around his neck, his body dangling in mid-air. That, John thought, his pack heavy on his shoulder and his hat pulled low, was not something a wise man would get involved in. And yet, he could not resist asking, “What did he do?”

The man in black turned around and glared at John. “He asked too many impertinent questions.”

The man with the rope around his neck laughed at that, a rueful, amused sound, and John decided he liked the dead man.

“You might want to move on,” the man in black continued in a voice that wasn’t a suggestion. “This is a bad place to be for a lone traveler.”

Rated PG.

read by Graeme Dunlop (of Cast of Wonders)

Originally Published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read it here!

Eskevan Three of Thorns had dropped his lensgear in the gutter. Twice he had been splashed by murky water while determining the best way to retrieve the lens. He had another hour before the water started circulating. Having sullied the yellow-trimmed coat that declared him a licensed librarian, Eskevan felt doubly reluctant either to remove his gauntlets or to plunge them into the water.

There the lensgear gleamed, polished and precise. Enough dithering. He would have to hope that no one questioned his credentials tonight. The master archivist always said a shabby librarian was no librarian at all, but it could not be helped.

Other parts of the city boasted libraries of indexed splendor. Other librarians handled nothing more threatening than curling vellum and tame, untarnished treatises. Eskevan did not aspire to any such thing. In the dimmest hours, he admitted that he exulted in the wayward winds and the grime underfoot, the heady knowledge of the paths words traveled.

He had heard the whispers up and down the city’s tiers, and the whispers distilled into a single warning: The Spider ascends. Eskevan, who lived merely three tiers underground, a child of the chasm’s kindly shallows, could not fathom the depths to which the city descended or the vast distances that the Spider must traverse.

Rated R: Contains some violence, and Disturbing Imagery

“You do that better than your sisters, Gabe,” Mom says to me as I
spread the corn masa on the soaked husk and spoon the right amount of
shredded spiced beef onto it. The aroma of meat braised in a sauce of
chiles, garlic, bay, pepper, and cloves makes every breath feel like
Christmas. My stomach growls softly in a tiny fit of impatient hunger.
It’s the first time I’ve been actually allowed to help with the
tamales since . . . well, since a long time. My sisters are good
cooks, too, so Mom’s praise isn’t cheap. “They always overstuff them.”

It will be. Mom’s cooking is still the best.

Rated PG.

Read by John Trevillian

Originally published as a Chap Book by Subterranean Press.

“That’s the third damned dead whore in seventeen days,” Detective Inspector Rupert Bitner said, his educated tones incongruous to his choice of words. He slurped tea loudly from the chipped enamel lid of a vacuum flask. Before Detective Sergeant Sean Cuan could warn him of the narrow figure approaching through the shadowy line of uniformed constables behind, Bitner continued, “And why we’re out here in the rain because somebody’s doing us a favor, can you explain to me?”

“Hello, Crown Investigator,” Cuan said, louder and sooner than necessary. He pushed past Bitner, the wings of his greatcoat brushing the senior investigator’s legs, and dropped his hastily capped fountain pen into his own coat pocket. Cold rain dripped from the rim of Cuan’s tipped umbrella and somehow worked past the brim of his bowler to trickle down his collar. He firmed his jaw to hide the flinch and extended his right hand.

“This is DI Rupert Bitner. I’m DS John Coen. We’re with CID.”

Introducing the DI first wouldn’t mollify Bitner enough–nothing would sweeten his mood after an encounter with one of the Crown’s Own, especially this one–but it might help blunt the edges. Unfortunately, reciting their ranks made it a little too plain that the newly established Criminal Investigations Division was modeled closely on the Crown Investigators–and that Garrett ranked them.

Cuan cleared his throat and finished, “We’re certainly relieved to see you.”

Someone leaning out one of the lamplit windows two or three stories above catcalled. Someone else hollered at him to shut up. Cuan didn’t look up to mark from which rooms the noises issued. The Detective Crown Investigator squinted at his hand as if unfamiliar with the appendage, but after a moment she transferred her blue velvet carpetbag to her left hand and laid her dainty glove across his palm before withdrawing it just as quickly.

She didn’t carry an umbrella, as if impervious to the rain, but Cuan noticed her dress was sturdy, warm wool rather than silk or organdy. Her back was straight in her corset and her expression never flickered, even when Bitner snorted and slurped more tea, deliberately discourteous.

“DCI Garrett, Detective Sergeant.”

Rated R: Contains violence.

Read by Laurice White

Originally published in Fantasy Magazine. Read it here! (Fantasy Magazine’s podcast is at the same place.)

The Circus waits in leaking trailers while Boss takes her lieutenants through the house.

Then, her lieutenants are Elena from the trapeze, and Panadrome the music man, who presses his accordion bellows tight to his side to keep it from sharp edges, and Alec, their final act, who folds his gleaming wings tight against his back so he can fit through the hole in the wall.

Inside, the ceiling is waterlogged and sagging, but when Alec opens his wings even the nails sing for him.

Alec laughs, and the birds in the rafters scatter as if he’s called them down.

(Alec will be dead in a year; these are the last birds he sees.)

Rated PG. 

Read by Emily Smith

Originally published in Jack-O Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy

My Abuela is making sugar skulls, and Tia Bibiana is helping her.   

Yesterday was the first of November, the Día de los Angelitos, and Abuela and Ramon and the neighborhood kids made the altar for the children.  I said I was too old to help, like I’m too old to go from house to house, but I stayed in the kitchen and watched. The last two years it was Lilia’s alone, with a plate of mac and cheese, and sugar-crusted tamarind candy, and the Clementine tangerines Lilia loved, and would steal from the wooden box and get in trouble because she ate them all. She used to peel the loose skin so it made an empty tangerine and would give it to me laughing when it collapsed under my eager thumb. We put her stuffed animals around the legs of the card table where the altar was set.  Abuela wrote her name on the skull with pink icing. 

Rated R: Contains disturbing imagery, themes, and candy.

There are two roads to Torkertown. One, the shorter and more direct route, leads across a barren upland moor, and the other, which is much longer, winds its tortuous way in and out among the hummocks and quagmires of the swamps, skirting the low hills to the east. It was a dangerous and tedious trail; so Solomon Kane halted in amazement when a breathless youth from the village he had just left, overtook him and implored him for God’s sake to take the swamp road.

“The swamp road!” Kane stared at the boy. He was a tall, gaunt man, was Solomon Kane, his darkly pallid face and deep brooding eyes, made more sombre by the drab Puritanical garb he affected.

“Yes, sir, ’tis far safer,” the youngster answered to his surprised exclamation.

“Then the moor road must be haunted by Satan himself, for your townsmen warned me against traversing the other.”

“Because of the quagmires, sir, that you might not see in the dark. You had better return to the village and continue your journey in the morning, sir.”

“Taking the swamp road?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kane shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

“The moon rises almost as soon as twilight dies. By its light I can reach Torkertown in a few hours, across the moor.”

“Sir, you had better not. No one ever goes that way. There are no houses at all upon the moor, while in the swamp there is the house of old Ezra who lives there all alone since his maniac cousin, Gideon, wandered off and died in the swamp and was never found–and old Ezra though a miser would not refuse you lodging should you decide to stop until morning. Since you must go, you had better go the swamp road.”

Kane eyed the boy piercingly. The lad squirmed and shuffled his feet.

“Since this moor road is so dour to wayfarers,” said the Puritan, “why did not the villagers tell me the whole tale, instead of vague mouthings?”

“Men like not to talk of it, sir. We hoped that you would take the swamp road after the men advised you to, but when we watched and saw that you turned not at the forks, they sent me to run after you and beg you to reconsider.”

“Name of the Devil!” exclaimed Kane sharply, the unaccustomed oath showing his irritation; “the swamp road and the moor road–what is it that threatens me and why should I go miles out of my way and risk the bogs and mires?”

“Sir,” said the boy, dropping his voice and drawing closer, “we be simple villagers who like not to talk of such things lest foul fortune befall us, but the moor road is a way accurst and hath not been traversed by any of the countryside for a year or more. It is death to walk those moors by night, as hath been found by some score of unfortunates. Some foul horror haunts the way and claims men for his victims.”

Rated R for violence and MONSTERS.

Two in the morning and he’s stumbling around in the attic, lost in horizontal archaeology: the further he goes, the older the artifacts become. The stuttering flashlight guides him past boxes of Christmas decorations and half-dead appliances, past garbage bags of old blankets and outgrown clothing stacked and bulging like black snowmen, over and around the twenty-year-old rubble of his son’s treasures: Tonka trucks and science fair projects, soccer trophies and summer camp pottery.

His shoulder brushes against the upright rail of a dissassembled crib, sends it sliding, and somewhere in the dark a mirror or storm window smashes. The noise doesn’t matter. There’s no one in the house below him to disturb.

Twenty feet from the far wall his way is blocked by a heap of wicker lawn furniture. He pulls apart the barricade piece by piece to make a narrow passage and scrapes through, straws tugging at his shirt. On the other side he crawls up and onto the back of a tilting oak desk immovable as a ship run aground.

The territory ahead is littered with the remains of his youth, the evidence of his life before he brought his wife and son to this house. Stacks of hardcover books, boxes of dusty-framed elementary school pictures—and toys. So many toys. Once upon a time he was the boy who didn’t like to go outside, the boy who never wanted to leave his room. The Boy Who Always Said No.

Rated PG.

Read by Wilson Fowlie (of The Maple Leaf Singers)

Originally published in Sleight of Hand.

From the tips of his twisted, spiky horns all the way down to his jagged claws, the monster was without any doubt the biggest, ugliest, most horrible creature ever made. Since his master had put him together out of spare parts lying around the house, some bits of him were power tools and old television sets, while other bits were made of plastic and wood and stone. His fiery eyes were streaked red and yellow, like the autumn moon, and even his ears and his hair had claws.

“There!” his master said proudly. “Aren’t you a fine fellow?”

“Am I?” the monster asked. He had just seen himself in a mirror, and wasn’t sure.

Rated PG.

Read by Marguerite Croft

Originally published in Those Who Fight Monsters, edited by Justin Gustainis

Marla picked up a letter opener shaped like the grim reaper’s scythe. “So I was supposed to get this a week or ten days ago?”

“Thereabouts,” Granger said, head bobbing, happy they were in agreement.

If I could fire him, or have him committed… But Granger was a powerful magician, in his way, and even if he wasn’t much use to the city’s secret shadow government of sorcerers, he mostly stayed out of the way in the park, and his elementals had been formidable warriors in last winter’s battle against the nightmare-things. She considered reprimanding him for not bringing the letter on time, but it would be like hitting a puppy fifteen minutes after it pissed on the carpet — the poor thing wouldn’t even understand what it was being disciplined foor.

Marla used the letter opener to pry up the wax blobs and unfolded the envelope, which wasn’t an envelope at all, but just a sheet of paper folded in on itself. The message wasn’t very long, but it said everything it needed to.

She came around the desk, shouting “Rondeau! I need you!” and clutching her dagger of office. This was going to be a bloody afternoon.

Rated R: Contains Language, and Monster

I knew from the moment I saw him that his beard was full of evil.

He walked into my shop carrying a copper-hilted cane, clopping its burnished tip smartly on the hair strewn tonsory floor with his every step. He wore camel-hide gloves with the hair turned inwards, so his hands seemed a milky mother-of-pearl white, as though agapornic. His eyes were a sharp hazel-brown, intelligent, intent upon the tonsory around him, absorbing the details, finally settling on me.

He walked flush up to me, busy as I was sweeping lopped brown locks into a scuttle, and smiled tightly, extending one of those sickeningly pale hands towards me. His thinly sliced moustache bristled as his upper lip curled back, and I knew the evil was in there too, peering out at me from each follicle end. I could feel the waft of his past deeds emanating from the light down of his cheeks.

Rated R for violence, gore.

Read by Marshal Latham, of the Journey Into…Podcast! (Check out the rules for the Edgar Allan Poe Writing Contest)

Originally published on Greg van Eekhout’s blog: Writing and Snacks (read it here)

We all started introducing ourselves.

Laughing Jack.

Shrieking Jack.

Happy Jack.

Wailing Jack.

Screaming Munsch Jack.

All the neighborhood Jacks. We are such good Jacks, we Jacks.

“This year we’re not putting up with any of that stuff our patch fathers have always put up with,” says Grimacing Jack. “No smashing in the gutter, no tossing in the street. No blowing up with firecrackers. No being ignored into November, sagging and settling and getting mottled black and furry. No way, my Jacks. This year we’re gonna make it the Year of the Jacks.”

We love our Grimacing Jack.

Rated PG: Contains Pumpkins