You’ve found the world’s premier horror fiction podcast. Pseudopod brings you the best short horror in audio form, to take with you anywhere.

WARNING: This is a podcast of horror fiction. The stories presented here are intended to disturb. They are likely to contain death, graphic violence, explicit sex (including sexual violence), hate crimes, blasphemy, or other themes and images that hook deep into your psyche. We do not provide ratings or content warnings. We assume by your listening that you wish to be disturbed for your entertainment. If there are any themes that you cannot deal with in fiction, that are too strongly personal to you, please do not listen.

Pseudopod is for mature audiences only. Hardly any story on Pseudopod is suitable for children. We mean this very seriously.

by Marc Laidlaw

“Cell Call” first appeared in BY MOONLIGHT ONLY (2003), a British small press collection edited by Stephen Jones. It has been reprinted several times since then. It has been adapted twice by independent film directors - once in the U.S., under its original title, and another version currently underway in Ireland under the title NIGHTLINE. “I was one of the last people I know to get a cell phone… I wrote this story around the year 2000 and was afraid it would date very quickly as cellphones became historical artifacts. If I were writing it now, I would probably have to update it and call it something like “Text Mess.”

MARC LAIDLAW published published half a dozen novels and many short stories before becoming a writer at Valve Software, where he wrote the HALF-LIFE series of games, and for the past few years has been writing dialog and lore for the competitive online game DOTA 2.

George Cleveland - is your reader this week. George lives in Tamworth, NH where he cares for cats with Attention Deficit Disorder. He is the Executive Director of the Gibson Center for Senior Services in North Conway. For many years, George was known as The Voice of the Valley on New Hampshire radio, where he conducted over 3500 interviews with newsmakers from all parts of the world - George has spoken with most major Presidential candidates, a representative of an interplanetary confederation and many noted authors and musicians. An avid collector of tales and legends, he sniffs out new hauntings and reports of long lost treasure. He has frequently written on people and places of interest, including musicians and artists and has appeared before numerous historical and school groups in the United States and Hawai’i speaking about his grandfather, former President Grover Cleveland. He was featured on C-SPAN’s ‘American Presidents’ series when they broadcast from Cleveland’s birthplace in Caldwell, New Jersey.

“”I have to throw on some clothes. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She was going to find him. He’d been only a few minutes, probably less than a mile, from home. She would be here any time. “

 

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by A.C. Wise.

“Venice Burning” originally appeared in FUTURE LOVECRAFT, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles, and published by Innsmouth Press. The book has since been reissued as a trade paperback by Prime Books, and is available in many major bookstores. It was actually written in Venice, and the character of Josie is inspired by a real jazz singer the author saw performing at a restaurant there.

The website of A.C. WISE can be found by clicking the link under her name in the by line above. She also co-edits the Journal of Unlikely Entomology.

Your reader this week is Ben Phillips - and enjoy his reading of this story because that’s gonna be all you hear for a while from him…

“A floating city, a sinking city, a drowned city; there isn’t much difference, really.

I stand on a pier, eyes shaded against the water’s glare. It’s 2015, by the smell - diesel and cooked meat, early enough that such things still exist. It might as well be 2017, or 3051. But this year is where my client is, so I wait, sweating inside a black, leather jacket, watching slick weeds stir below lapping waves.”

 

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by Greg Stolze.

“Enzymes” is available for free on his web site.

GREG STOLZE has published several licensed novels - A HUNGER LIKE FIRE, ASHES AND ANGEL WINGS - as well as being anthologized here and there - DELTA GREEN: ALIEN INTELLIGENCE with “Don’t Read This Book” & “By No Means Vulgar”.

Your reader this week - Kyle Akers - is the front-man of Antennas Up, an electro-pop rock band from Kansas City. A budding voice talent, he continues to expand his reading roles across several podcasts. Antennas Up’s new album “The Awkward Phase” is available on iTunes and from Antennas Up music web site. He can also be heard occasionally on the No Sleep Podcast

“Maybe I’m not human, maybe I never was. I’m pretty sure humans never feel like I do when I drink gasoline, that sweet intoxication, so pregnant with possibility and power. It’s like the power of the sun, and of a great tree that drew in sunlight to grow, and of an ancient beast that ate of the tree and died, that sank into the earth and was worked on by millions of years until it turned to oil. It’s like all those kinds of power, concentrated step by step, and the toil of the drillers and refineries and pump mechanics too. Gasoline is everything. Gasoline is the elixir of modern civilization and I’m one with it when I drink. All the clouds of exhaust and all the labor of machines and their men, I’m all within it.

Then I drop off and I have to crawl out, I’m man-bodied again, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with fake-pearl snaps. My fingers are crusted with rust and black under the nails but I run them through my hair anyway. It’s long hair, unkempt and black. I never get it cut, never trim my beard, but they stay the same.”

 

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by William Meikle.

“The Persistence of Memory” originally appeared in the collection DARK MELODIES (Dark Regions Press 2012). “Think of happy popular piano players/singers - Russ Conway, Liberace, Fats Waller, Fats Domino. And think of what’s behind the smiles.”.

William Meikle is a Scottish writer with fifteen novels published in the genre press and over 250 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work appears in many professional magazines and anthologies and he has recent short story sales to Nature Futures, Penumbra and Daily Science Fiction among others. He now lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out at William Meikle.com. His Dark Regions Press collection DARK MELODIES (2012) is available now in hardcover and paperback - check it out here.

Your reader this week - Christiana Ellis - was last heard here reading PSEUDOPOD 268: Let There Be Darkness.

“Betty woke with a start, heart pounding so loud in her ears that it took several seconds to realize a different sound had brought her so rudely awake; someone was playing the piano in the dining room beneath her.

‘What else could it be?’”

 

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by Michael Marshall Smith.

First published as a chapbook from Nightjar Press, September 2009, this story won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 2011 and appeared in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR for that year. The fee for this story has been generously donated to Cats Protection League - please click the link and consider making some cat’s life a little easier.

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published over seventy short stories, and three novels — ONLY FORWARD, SPARES and ONE OF US — winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has been awarded the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as MICHAEL MARSHALL, he has published six internationally-bestselling thrillers including THE STRAW MEN, THE INTRUDERS and KILLER MOVE. His next novel, THE FORGOTTEN, will be published in 2013. He is currently involved in screenwriting projects including a television pilot and an animated movie for children. He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife and son. Check out his website at the link under his byline above.

Your reader this week is Donna Scott - Donna Scott is a short fiction writer, editor, performance poet, storyteller and comedian as well as Awards Administrator for the British Science Fiction Association. She has recently worked with Northampton Museum and Art Gallery to produce an exhibition on the 1612 Northampton Witch Trials and a number of spin-off projects in the region. To find out about her latest projects and appearances check out her website here

“The first thing I was unhappy about was the dark. I do not like the dark very very much. It is not the worst thing in the world but it is also not the best thing in the world, either. When I was very smaller I used to wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and be scared when I woke up, because it was so dark. I would go to bed with my light on, the one light that turns round and round, on the drawers by the side of my bed. It has animals on it and it turns around and it makes shapes and patterns on the ceiling and it is pretty and my mummy’s friend Jeanette gave it to me. It is not very too bright but it is bright enough and you can see what is what. But then it started that when I woke up in the middle of the night, the light would not be on any more and it would be completely dark instead and it would make me sad. I didn’t understand this but one night when I’d woken up and cried a lot my mummy told me that she came in every night and turned off the light every night after I was asleep, so it didn’t wake me up. But I said that wasn’t any good, because if I did wake up in the night and the light wasn’t on, then I might be scared, and cry. She said it seemed that I was waking every night, and the she and daddy had worked out that it might be the light that kept me awake, and after a while I was awake I’d get up and go into their room and see what was up with them, which meant she got no sleep any night ever and it was driving her completely nuts.

My light was not on and I was cold.”

 

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by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

This story previously appeared in ACROSS THE BRIDGE the Christmas Annual of 1871 in the magazine “Once a Week”. It is set in Le Fanu’s invented Lake District town of Golden Friars. It can be read online here.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. Three of his best known works are UNCLE SILAS, CARMILLA and THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD. He studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, was called to the bar in 1839, but he never practiced and soon abandoned law for journalism. In 1838 he began contributing stories to the Dublin University Magazine, including his first ghost story, entitled <">