Private Warren lay all night in the freezing rain. There wasn’t much pain. The bullet had clipped something high up in his neck and now he couldn’t move or cry out. But he didn’t want to think about that, plus he was breathing normally, and no one seemed to be shooting anymore. He’d slid down the slope but, come dawn, someone from 4 or 5 Platoon would notice he was missing and get a team together to collect him. But his teeth were chattering and his fingers were blue.
         Eventually the rain stopped and the sky began to lighten. Everything was covered in mist. He couldn’t see two meters in front of him.
         Then from out of the murk came a flapping of wings. A swirl of mist, and Warren was face to face with a bird, maybe 25 centimeters tall, black with a white tail and an orange face. A sharp hooked beak. They stared at each other. The bird paced back and forth. They stared at each other. The bird paced, back and forth.
         The bird shrieked like a cat: wee-ooo! From all around, echoes and responses: we-ooo, weee-ooooo-ooooo.
         More birds arrived, some smaller, some bigger. They paced and watched him. They made clicking noises. There was a sense of careful deliberation.
         The first bird trotted over and pecked Warren on the scalp. He barely felt it, or the trickle of blood that ran down his forehead. The bird returned to its flock. More clicking. Then they advanced.
         Lieutenant Ascroft, alerted by the noise, emerged from the evaporating mist and fired his SLR into the air. The birds flew away furious.
         Onboard Mother Hen, the doctor said most of the wounds were superficial. He would eventually regain sight in his left eye, but the right one is a no-hoper, I’m afraid. As for the paralysis, we will have to wait and see. Entirely possible it’s only temporary.
         So Private Warren, sightless, his head and upper body cocooned in gauze, lay in his hospital bed in the windowless cabin on the hospital ship and dreamed of flapping wings and bloody beaks and the screams of the johnny rooks.
         Now, many years later, he is a menace to his neighbors, this half-blind old man who stalks the sidewalks and throws stones at every bird he sees and occasionally breaks a window. We honor him for his service, say the adults, but this is getting to be too much. The teenagers, for their part, have learned to imitate a variety of bird calls, and they amuse themselves by serenading him at night. No one knows that Private Warren still keeps his old Browning Hi-Power oiled and in easy reach by his bedside.

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The post 16. The Johnny Rooks appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

It’s time for another stuggle with the enigmatic artistry of Scott Bishop’s Dark Fantasy, this time with an episode entitled “The Curse of the Neanderthal.” A painter is desperate to contact her sister after being rescued from a strange mishap. Was she saved by a ghost? Was it a swerf? Will any of that matter by the end? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 412: The Curse of the Neanderthal appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Love potions brewed from cinnamon and the boiled sperm of ancient giants. An intoxicating liqueur distilled from a diabetic’s pancreas. Oriental smelling salts to awaken your inner chi, derived from rendered corpses provided by the Great Leap Forward. Other liquid aids for memory and alertness. These concoctions advertised in the pages of Soldier of Fortune and Werewolf by Night in their November 1972 installments, sold by mail order: cashier’s checks sent to a post office box in Omaha.
         Some weeks later, a string-tied brown paper parcel arrives. You take it to your garage to unwrap it. Instructions for use in purple mimeo: The ingurgitation of this substance to be accompanied by these particular gestures of the hands, these particular concepts strongly focused upon in the mind, no sexual intercourse for a week beforehand. Not a problem for you, you think.
         You are looking for a sense of freedom. Other men have affairs, abandon their families, write Rabbit, Run. Tinker with cars. You drink this gritty brown elixir derived from the weeping sores of asteroids and dream of traveling through space with Buck Rogers and John Carter. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep. Your kid bothers you about homework. Your wife bothers you about money and booze. The next day you drink the seawater and ambergris potion and in your mind you hold the idea of the deep black sea and the curious luminescent fellow travelers there. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you have a fight, you go back to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep on the couch. The next day you drink the potion made from the vaginal secretions of virgins strangled with silken cords. You’re beginning to doubt the efficaciousness of all this.
         Shouldn’t you be at work? your wife asks, after the kid is gone to school. The spring day is bright and blue; you are lingering in the driveway by the car while the bees buzz and the neighbors eavesdrop. You look pale, she says.
         Your skin looks flaky, she says.
         You wave away her concern. A few winged things float free from your hand and fly away.
         What was that? she asks. Drymouthed you try to answer, but pink moths detach from the inside of your throat and the ones not mashed by your teeth escape into the morning sky.
         She backs away. Ten thousand tiny black eyes open on your skin. You flutter beneath your clothes. Then the surface of you unfolds into thousands of beautiful silken moths, which stir their tessellated wings into alertness and stream out from your sleeves and pantslegs and collar—your skin taking flight in a cloud of white wings and eyelash-fine antennae. They soar and disperse; the rest of you, abandoned, sunlight-gleaming muscles leaking, collapses in a red cascade, accompanied by your cordless screams and Mary’s terrified stare and the perplexed barking of the neighbor’s spaniel as it leaps and snaps without effect at the many parts of you now winging among the flowers and the shade.

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The post 15. Write for Free Sample appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Join us for Escape’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s short story, “Poison.” William Conrad and Jack Webb star in this story of an encounter with a deadly krait snake. But one man’s chances of survival are diminished by his own prejudices! Will he survive the night? How does the adaptation compare to others? Why does this podcast smell like tires? What flavor of Slurpee requires a note from a parent or guardian? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 411: Poison appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

It was Stage 4, and the relative five-year survival rate was 27%. But the doctor assured them that treatments were advancing all the time. It was far too early to despair.
         On the ride home she cried. He would have too, but he needed to focus on driving. At the house they laid down on the bed and held each other and let it all out.
         The next morning he felt a little better. Clearer, his mind fresh like blue skies after a thunderstorm. But every time he tried to think about it, a little twinge in his gut warned him to stay away. He found that he couldn’t raise the subject with her, but she didn’t either so he supposed she was grateful for it.
         Eventually they told their friends and family. She started chemo. They shaved her head. They took that trip to Spain. Secretly he was buying experimental drugs from China and Russia on the web and having them shipped to a PO Box rented under a false name. He slipped them in with her prescribed meds. She would never have allowed it otherwise; she had worked for thirty years as a consumer safety inspector and had seen her share of quacks.
         Her moods were erratic. She smoked a lot of pot. The cancer didn’t seem to be spreading further, that was something at least.
         A year passed in this way. She seemed to be improving. He kept giving her the weird pills. He had an affair. Eventually the doctor started using works like encouraging. He broke it off with the girlfriend. Mom found out anyway and threw him out of the house and my sister moved in with her.
         Without the extra pills she seemed to get worse. Six weeks later she died in the hospital. Sister wouldn’t speak to dad anymore. Neither would the girlfriend. He was alone except for me.
         I asked to see one of the pills. It was a capsule, not too big, red on one end and white on the other, with Cyrillic writing on it. I broke it open. Inside was nothing, literally nothing. They’d dried out, dad said, but they’d contained the tears of Russian saints and Chinese sages. He’d ordered a new batch to take himself, he said. In his mind they had given her an extra year of life, such as it was. If he took them regularly himself, who knows how many extra years he could get.
         Since then he’s lived a lot longer than the actuarial tables would suggest, but I doubt it’s a very happy life. Then again, he doesn’t ask for much: not love, not friendship, not happiness, success or recognition. All desires eliminated, a bodhisattva of boredom. I visit my father in the nursing home where he has been living for the last thirty years and bring him his share of the pills. We watch the others play bingo and we barely talk and he never once casts a single look at any of the pretty nurses.

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The post 14. Managing Expectations appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week’s episode features a performance by Eva le Gallienne in an episode of Suspense entitled “Phobia.” She plays a wealthy woman with a strange and severe phobia. Between caring for her shoplifting sister and appeasing her maid, this woman becomes targeted by blackmail and theft. Can she navigate these threats despite her condition? Does something seem off about the story’s conclusion? Why does this podcast smell like tires? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 410: Phobia appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Barry woke up thinking it would be a good day. He’d wrapped the big work project, and had nothing on his calendar until the following Monday. So why not enjoy the perfect weather and take a walk in the park? But on his way there he fell down an open manhole and died. Fucking Barry.
         A passing samaritan saw it happen. He shouted and waved for help. A bunch of folks ran into the middle of the street and tried calling down to Barry, but he was already dead, alas. Then a big white Ford F-150, its brake lines filled with chocolate syrup, came zooming down the steep street and splattered them all. Five dead in traffic accident! read the initial news reports. But that didn’t count Barry, or, oops, the driver of the truck, who plowed into a fruit stand and broke his neck. Bananas everywhere! People slipped and cracked their spines.
         The cops arrived. They were in a foul mood: their morning jelly donuts had been filled with mayonnaise, and they had arrested the hapless baker, who now shared a cell with a psychopathic strangler. The cops shouted keep back, keep back, to the onlookers, then started tasing folks. Their taser batteries had been secretly upgraded, and the people they shocked jerked all over the place, their hair standing straight up, and smoke shot out from their shirt fronts.
         Meanwhile the fire station was on fire and all the water was off! Those guys just didn’t know what to do. The chief stood outside watching the blaze, his hands on his hips and a Kick Me sign on his back. So some guy kicked him in the knees and he fell down and then a guy kicked his face in.
         The 911 operators were trying to get their computers to stop showing porn videos starring their children. In the skyscrapers, hidden pneumatic systems blew fountains of shit at anyone flushing. Countless bicycle couriers went down, sticks in their spokes. In St. Mary’s ICU, a dozen glitter bombs went off. Throughout the city, tampons were found to contain surprise embedded ground glass (for that just-been-raped feeling!). Junkies had their stashes replaced with cement dust, and babies’ dolls wept toxic sludge. The mayor was nowhere to be found: he had been Saran-wrapped to his motel room bed, and a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the door.
         And so it went. April, its Day come round again at last, kept on fucking with all the fucking fools.

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The post 13. April Fucking Fools appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

There were new neighbors on the other side of the double bungalow. The older gay guys had bought a condo and moved out, and these new kids sucked. They threw a party (thanks for the heads-up, guys) and invited Philip and Sherry over. They’d already made the place their own, as Philip, annoyed by a week of noisy hammering and thumping, was aware. The place was like a Victorian brothel, walls draped with dark brown fabrics in Indian patterns. Crummy old couches, beanbag chairs, a plastic bead curtain that clicked and clacked every time you went into the kitchen. A smell of marijuana (Phil had no objection to that) but also patchouli and sandalwood, jasmine, rose and musk. Plus all their longhaired party guests stank of B.O. All this on the other side of their own wall.
         The skinny one, Rocket (did he hear that name right?) kept touching Phil on the shoulder as they talked and using his name a lot: You see what I mean, Phil; look at it this way, Phil; you get it, right, Phil?
         Rocket kept talking about boundaries, house rules, expectations, good neighborliness. (Who are you to talk this way, when Sherry and I have lived here five years? Phil had never met such a condescending son of a bitch.)
         They’d brought over some canned margaritas, and to get away from Rocket and his friends (roommates? who else lived here anyway?), Phil went to get some drinks. The kitchen was unoccupied except for two little girls, each about two years old, sitting alone on the kitchen table. They seemed happy enough playing with each other, but that was no place for them. Where are your mommies? asked Phil. Where are your mommies and daddies?
         One of the girls said: Up-stairs, and pointed. But upstairs was only the shared attic space. He lifted both girls down from the table and led them out of the kitchen.
         The party had moved to the backyard. At least you can breathe back here, he thought.
         One of the roommates (?) came over to Phil. He seemed to ignore the kids. You’re welcome to use our grill, he said, but please clean it afterward, and don’t grill any meat on it.
         Whose kids are these? asked Phil. The guy walked away without answering. It was starting to drizzle. Where was Sherry?
         Two cute hippie chicks were sitting on a bench eating veggie kebabs. Are these your kids? he asked them. They laughed.
         Hey everybody! he yelled. Hey everybody! Whose kids are these? No one paid any attention. The kids seemed unconcerned. He got them a couple of Sprites and sat at the picnic table. The sun came out again and Phil shivered in a sunbeam. Rocket came over and sat next to the kids but ignored them.
         You having a good time, Phil? he asked.
         These kids need their mothers, he said.
         You don’t need to worry about them, said Rocket. They take care of themselves.
         That’s not possible. They’re, like, two.
         Rocket touched him on the shoulder. You should take care of them, then, he said with a look of pity.
         Phil and Sherry raised the girls for the next four years and when the commune moved out and the young newlyweds moved in and gave the place a new coat of paint and an overall well-needed reno, Phil and Sherry packed in a rush and left the girls in the attic (no forwarding address), and when the young newlyweds found them they had no choice but to take them in, these cheerful two-year olds.

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The post 12. Family Planning appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Once again, we’re checking out a series we haven’t listened to before. This time it’s The Adventures of the Falcon! This episode, “The Widow’s Gorilla,” features private detective Michael Waring’s hunt for a suicide note that might or might not exist which could prove or disprove a murder that may or may not have happened. How much money could this note be worth? Who or what is the widow’s gorilla? Does the pronunciation of Miracle Whip change depending on how it’s being served? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 409: The Widow’s Gorilla appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Pronouns? No, I don’t care what he calls himself. I object to his adverbs. A novelist should know better than this. He can’t just write about a guy walking to the store. He has to say that the guy walked there pensively or distractedly or whatever. You hear him tell a story, and it’s like he wants to nail down every possible element of it so hard that there’s no room for you to work any imagination. Plus, adverbs are all sort of boring anyway. He can’t say that a flight was long, or tedious, or even long and tedious. He has to call it a tediously long flight. For real, what does that add? It’s almost an anti-word. It sucks meaning out of the sentence. And it’s pompous. Some writers like to pad their word count and make fatter books, but that’s not what’s going on here: long and tedious is three words, tediously long is two. The flowers blossomed aromatically, my God. And the bees! The bees buzzed cheerfully. Do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain? Twenty-one billion. A bee has 170 thousand. That’s about 123,000 times fewer neurons. Do you think a bee is buzzing around feeling cheerful? Or feeling anything at all that we would consider feeling? It’s the pathetic fallacy on top of everything else. Liquidly, languidly, lavishly, lividly. Are there proportionately more adverbs that start with the letter L? Or is that just another weird tic of his? Luckily, lucratively. Lustily. That’s another thing. Sex talk is not improved with adverbs. She approached seductively, I can just about allow that one. But she rasped huskily? Or husked raspily, or whatever it was? Tantalizingly, delectably, spicily. Thirstily, get her a drink of water, my man. Women pose fetchingly. Guns are waved menacingly. Cars speed off rapidly. Bad guys act sinisterly. Look, a minute ago I used the word proportionately, I know you think that’s a gotcha but what other word would you use? You’d probably say in proportion to, but then you have to rearrange the whole sentence to work it that way and it’s awkward. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, I’m not a fundamentalist about this. But there’s a limit. To be clear, I don’t object to flat adverbs. A car can drive fast. The color blue can be a deep blue, at least it’s not coloring bluely or whatever. It’s those -ly sounds, every time I hear one, the prose deflates a little more. Oh, and plus, his books are also just full of people with names ending in -ly. Beverly, Bailey, Emily, Billy, Tilly, Lily, it’s like he’s self-aware enough to know he’s overusing the sound and is making jokes about it. But you can’t just say, I have a bad habit, and then just keep drawing everybody’s attention to your bad habit. That doesn’t improve life for anybody. It just makes you seem like a jerk.
         I met a guy in the airport bar the other day, we got to talking and he asked me, If you had one wish, etc., and I said, I want to get rid of every adverb in the world. And he said, Thy benefaction shall be consummated ere the eve of the next full moon, and at first I thought he said it menacingly, but then I realized I was wrong and he had just said it in a menacing manner, and who knows, maybe the guy wasn’t just some crank, because I’m reading the new novel at the moment and I have to say it’s a whole lot better in the adverb regard.

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The post 11. Mostly I Object to His Adverbs appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

There’s an episode of The Shadow that’s been waiting for us in the Listener Library and this week our Patreon supporter James has sent us to go get it! Thanks, James! “Hypnotic Death” features Lamont Cranston stumbling on to a madman’s plot to combine hypnotism, murder, and insurance fraud. But even the Shadow might be overwhelmed by this opponent. Can Lamont save an innocent man from an accusation of murder? If the Shadow cannot stop this criminal hypnotist, who can? What do Tim and Eric have in common with George Clooney? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 408: Hypnotic Death appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Someone, probably one of my aunts, bought Dr. Reuben’s book when it came out in paperback, and when my grandfather found out he banished it to the attic. Why he didn’t throw it out I don’t know, but I found it there when I was about eleven years old and immediately read it from cover to cover.
         It wasn’t until years later that I began to realize how bad most of it was. Recently I looked through an issue of Playboy from the month I was born and I found a long article by Betty Rollin just demolishing everything about the book. So even at the time, lots of people knew it was nonsense.
         Still, the damage had been done, to me at least. I grew up with weird ideas about gay people, and prostitutes, and the female orgasm, and consent, and milk for some reason.
         I’m looking at the book right now. I have it on my dining room table sitting next to Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, a book I stole from the public library when I was thirteen. Everything I knew about hippies I learned from that book. Both paperbacks have lurid yellow covers and insistent title fonts. When I set them side by side like this, I can imagine them talking to each other, sharing secrets and harmful advice. I imagine my preteen self whispering to these books, I am curious, yellows.
         Sometimes I glance over my bookshelves, which contain much of a lifetime of my own reading, and I mentally sort the authors into categories: narcissist, racist, alcoholic, junkie, rapist, anti-Semite, fraud, charlatan, abuser, criminal, murderer, nazi. William S. Burroughs shot his wife. Rimbaud smuggled slaves and ivory. Alice Walker and her lizard people. Ezra Pound, my God. These are the men (and less often, women), who have formed my mind. I look at these books, and I imagine multiplying them a million million times, until I have a bookshelf the size of the world, and then I imagine a million billion mindless termites eating their way through it all, chewing away at any wisdom or goodness or compassion or human dignity, leaving behind just the ugliness to be preserved for future generations. That’s my vision of the future and I think it’s coming true. Sometimes I think it would be better if everybody forgot everything.
         I masturbate, and ejaculate clotted curds of cum onto the cover of Dr. Reuben’s book. Something is crawling around in my head so I smack myself and smack myself again until I dislodge a few termites from my ear, where they have crawled after hatching in the rottenest areas of my brain. They fly. I watch them circle each other in the air, then drop down to land in my spunk, and their wings yank off and they begin to mate—and with my notepad and pencil I document it all.

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The post 10. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week is a double-feature exploration of Anthony Boucher’s story, “They Bite,” featuring a reading of the original by our own Joshua and the adaptation produced by Nightfall! The story features a mysterious loner in the desert camped out by an adobe ruin. The locals claim this ruin is the home to some mysterious entity that kills those who come to close. Folks cannot give this threat a name, but ominously warn, “They bite!” What is the cause of these strange deaths? How do these two different audio presentations compare in capturing the story? Will Joshua be reading to his co-hosts on a regular basis after this? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 407: They Bite appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Pestilent, pustulant, riddled by vice and wracked with pain, the King lay abed, and his subjects rejoiced, but secretly, and in expectation.
         The doctors, such of them who had not yet been killed, consulted their Galen and Avicenna and were united in their advice: alcohol and narcotics, so that the King be kept in a permanent stupor. In this way they hoped to wait out the storm. But the King, whose stomach had been flayed by a lifetime of excess, could no longer keep most liquids down, and spent his days sitting bedsore in a state of glittering fury.
         Astrologers and alchemists arrived, employing poultices, oils, ointments, linaments, douches and creams, and departed with no result and no payment except their lives. Servants left his chamber weeping, escorted by guards, and rarely returned.
         The King made his terrible command: I shall be cured within a week or everyone in this household shall die, by which he meant, beyond his doctors and servants, also his brother and sisters and children and grandchildren and mistresses and his new young mouse of a queen.
         Non interna, ergo externa, the doctors reasoned, and with the assistance of the queen they prepared a mixture of balsam and spirits of wine, in which they soaked his sheets and nightclothes and wrapped him therein, and sat all of them in eager attendance around the royal bed.
         That night the King writhed as the cloths burned his seeping skin but in the morning he showed more animation than he had in months. The process was repeated, with still more heartening results.
         On the fourth day the King proclaimed himself fit enough to hear the Holy Word, and it was read to him, such lessons on mercy and forgiveness as he desired to hear, and he wept at their truth. Thus it was also on the fifth and sixth days. His sores had dried, his lungs no longer rattled.
         On the seventh day he announced himself well enough to return to affairs of state the following morning. All in attendance proclaimed the glory of God. Solitude for this last night, prescribed the doctors, weepingly supported in this suggestion by the queen. So by the light of the late afternoon he read the gospels, and when the chamber grew dim he drew a bedside candle closer and in this way ignited his bedclothes and was engulfed in a terrible holocaust. He burned with his family Bible and although the horrified servants extinguished the inferno as quickly as they could, he perished in terrible voiceless agony over the following week, and all his subjects, much relieved, proclaimed the glory of God.

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The post 9. Balm of Gilead appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The gaucho reached over the horse’s shoulder and with two quick jabs of his facón he punctured the animal’s eyes. It screamed. It kicked but its legs were bound. Now it was on its knees. Blood sprayed on the sand. I accepted the knife from my man.
         Across the courtyard my daughter knelt in her filthy wedding dress, weeping, hands behind her back. As behind me they wrestled his famous stallion to the dirt I crossed to her, cut her zip ties and flung the knife to the ground.
         That last of his will trot freely on our estancia, I informed her. Blind, it will receive no harm or help from no one, until finally it loses its footing on a river stone and breaks a foreleg, and is eaten by foxes.
         She wailed, and clawed at the dirt.
         As for the man you call your husband, I have personally cut off his penis and balls, and thrown them to my cats. Later, when he died, my men put aside their baseball bats and took up hacksaws. There is much of him still around, if you care to look.
         In two years, I said, you will have learned from our Sisters at—
         A horse’s scream behind me.
         Some manners and propriety, I said. A spray of sand hit the back of my neck. I turned.
         His rodeo stallion, blind and enraged, its hoofs crusted with gore, my men sprawled at its feet among the broken ropes. It rears and rushes; a horse-cock huge and crimson swats me as the stallion tramples by, punching divots in the chests of my fallen men. It stops before my daughter, who stands to kiss the shredded eyes, and mounts him. She digs her bloody fingers into its mane and spreads herself on its back, and they ride away without a look back from her.
         The ground is black. Everywhere is the smell of piss and copper. Someone gurgles. Something, I realize, is leaking from me.

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The post 8.  Criollo appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week, we’re listening to an episode of Suspense entitled “Fragile Contents Death,” recommended to us by our Patreon supporter Cole! Thanks, Cole! The story features a postmaster who receives word that a time bomb is hidden somewhere in all the items passing through his post office. He and his staff only have a few hours to find the explosive, and it will detonate if the package is opened! How can they possibly find the bomb in time? Why would someone put a bomb in the mail? What’s the right way to punctuate the title of the show? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 406: Fragile Contents Death appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The Mirror-man grew up playing amusing little tricks. He reversed his sister’s face when she was ten years old; now, when she looked in the mirror, Abby saw her mole on her left cheek and not the right one where it had always appeared to be before. It was a bizarre family mystery that their parents never stopped talking about.
         Later he got an internship in a hospital. Once or twice he’d secretly reverse patients’ inner organs right before their surgeries, to the shock of the surgeon and the medical team. Mostly he contented himself with flipping tumors around, or switching a bum knee for a healthy one randomly throughout the week. He found confusion and pain to be great fun.
         On walks around town he caused accidents by reversing engine blocks, reversing axles. Detours pointed the wrong way. He swapped street signs and house numbers into illegibility.
         He might have gone on along his cruel but only semi-harmful way except that he read an article on chirality in Nature. Who knew that molecules could be right-handed or left-handed? It was news to him! Proteins are right-handed, DNA is left-handed. T-cells, amino acids, all of that. Their shapes allowed them to interact with other molecules—if they were the other way round, it would be like trying to put a right-handed glove on your left hand. It just won’t work.
         He bought some books on organic chemistry and decided to give it a whirl. He killed a few plants by reversing their carbohydrates, then executed a local politician by reversing his immune system. But he made a mistake when he reversed his landlady’s DNA—she boiled away with cancers within the week, but something had aroused suspicion, and he was arrested. Then he panicked and accidentally killed all the cops in the jailhouse.
         Now no one will go near him. The entire city block has been evacuated. He can reverse the cell door lock, he supposes, but one step out that door and he’ll probably get a sniper’s bullet in his head. He is contemplating drastic measures. He’d read that mirror bacteria would be able to slip around antibiotics and amoeboid predators, and infect all sorts of things: humans, animals…. It couldn’t be contained and it couldn’t be cured. It’s a possibility.
         He doesn’t want to die in this cell, but if he has to, he’ll kill the world while he’s at it.

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The post 7. The nam-rorriM appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

As we discussed in episode 405, “The Hat, the Bed, and John J. Catherine,” from Quiet Please, our first attempt at a secret episode for our Patreon supporters was featured “Hat on a Bed,” from the series Origin of Superstition. Unfortunately, the recording had a few sound issues (including Tim having a cold) so we redid our inaugural episode with a different show to discuss. For the curious who are willing to overlook these flaws, we offer this abandoned alternative which tells the tale of an uninvited guest, an accusation of murder, and a truly outlandish courtroom stunt.  Thank you again for your support of the podcast and we hope you enjoy this strange cautionary tale! 

The post Patreon Secret Episode 1 (Alternate): Hat on a Bed Preview appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week we’re diving into one the final episodes of Quiet Please, “The Hat, the Bed, and John J. Catherine”! An eccentric aspiring actor, relegated to the position of a stage hand, sees a hat on a bed onstage. Convinced that the omen foretells death, he walks away from his job into a strange, dreamlike state. Did he indeed experience a preview of death? What hidden meanings live within his theatrical references? Did Wyllis Cooper steal this story from the Coen Brothers? Listen for yourself and find out! (And check out a special preview of our first attempt at a secret episode for our Patreon supporters, “Hat on a Bed,” from the series Origin of Superstition!) Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 405: The Hat, the Bed, and John J. Catherine appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

At first he thinks it’s a scarecrow, but then he notices all the flies. And it smells. My God, he has to tell the cops! But there’s no cell service in these endless rows of corn, this blue-sky-hot-sun Midwest nostalgia dream that has now become a Stephen King landscape of fear. The scarecrow is still dripping.
         He pushes his way through the rows, back the way he came. A sparrow swoops in front of his face. A corn snake slithers in the shade. Here is another scarecrow, a woman. He turns and runs parallel to the rows—although the vanishing point seems miles away, surely he will eventually exit into the normal world again. A breeze picks up behind him, and the corn to either side swishes and rustles, keeping pace with him.
         It must be just about noon. Dark shadows are mixed with the golden susurrating stalks, crucified arms outspread. He stumbles but keeps running. He is breathing some sort of corn dust; it is stinging his eyes. Here is a row of scarecrows, a whole family. Parts of a whole family.
         Somewhere ahead of him a dog is barking. Should he go toward it? But someone has planted these people in the fields—best to go another way. And so in this manner he outthinks himself and becomes lost. His pace reduced to a jumpy walk, he tries to pick a direction and keep to it. But he has seen this particular scarecrow-man before, he knows, so he’s not getting anywhere.
         He’s sunburnt. He rests for a few minutes under the man, staying away from the pool of sticky mud. As the only remotely human things in sight, by now the scarecrows are almost a source of comfort. Eventually he moves on, he hopes more methodically.
         In the end he counts more than forty of them before he escapes. He drives his car back to the hotel, but he does not inform the police, or his wife or children. In the bad years to come he often likes to lie in bed while Laura sleeps, and close his eyes, and return to them in his imagination, where they counsel and console him, and whisper surprising and unusual ideas that adjust his thinking and give him the resolve to carry on, even just a little longer.
         Even just a little longer, they whisper with their cornsilk mouths.

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The post 6. Whispers appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week we bravely check out an episode Dangerous Assignment entitled (arguably) “Investigate Missing Scientists”! Globetrotting adventurer Steve Mitchell is sent to Alaska to track down a former Nazi scientist and an American physicist who appear to have gone missing. Confronted by an unpaid hotel bill and a wide range of dialects, Mitchell will stop at nothing to solve this mystery! What happened to these scientists? What is that smell? Who made cartoon theme music so complicated? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 404: Investigate Missing Scientists appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This isn’t right, this can’t be happening. There’s a firewall to protect this. But somehow she’s gotten around it.
         After so many weeks of careful information-grooming, to see the monkey go wild on all this, fuuuuuck: Wikipedia, Facebook, TikTok, X. On the other side of the bulletproof glass, this monkey, screeching and tangling her wires, is just drinking it all in. At the base of her neck, the receiver blinks an angry red.
         The emergency response team is burning through the locks, but who knows how long that’ll take. The kill team is here too, but they’re just standing around like douchebags: facemasks and limp M4s.
         I watch Doctor Mebble bleed out under his computer station, the monkey, jumping, splashing pawprints in his blood, speckling the glass. The lab team is scattered everywhere.
         Reddit, eBay, YouTube, ChatGPT.
         We’d picked her specifically for her docility. Doctor Mebble raised her since birth. The brain surgery had been impeccable, that level of thing could have won major prizes if made public. Hormones in the spine, aloe on the fur, a continuous wash across the eyeballs. The information drip.
         No one could have predicted. The firewall! But maybe the cognitive— Metastastize— Oh, this is bad.
         Temu, Yandex.
         The monkey is visibly in heat. With her augmented limbs she shatters monitors, ceiling tiles, CPUs, bodies. She chews everything into bits. She punches cracks into the viewing windows.
         Twitch, xHamster, Bing. The rage of her!
         The door is breached. The kill team moves in, and dies. The monkey erupts out into the viewing chamber, trailing brain matter and bloody broken wires, and praise God, she leaves the rest of us alone. She smashes through a window and, I assume, thirty stories below us she hits the ground, or maybe a person, but whatever it is she’s unfazed, and hops up and runs away, who knows where. And now we’re all fucked!

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The crypt. The web-draped statuary. Unlit candles in iron candelabras. Moon-bright images in stained glass: youth and death and eternity: Christ suffering, Christ is risen. Floral bas-reliefs with secret skeletons engraved. Beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined (as George Eliot once wrote). The tomb and inscribed effigies. Within, the mortal dust of the prince and his wife, too soon removed from us. The grave mold, the conquering worm, the bracelet of bright hair about the bone. The Gothic adoration.
         Fervid she prayed, her knees stinging on the cracked uneven stones.
         She was answered. A hollow voice emerged from the carved mouth of the dead prince, carried on a miasmic fetor: Whence comes this woman-thing?
         Lord, forgive my hope. Dearly I desire an intercession.
         Speak.
         A tale she told of grave illness in the family: one child lost, a father too, and a tiny boy whose soul was balanced between heaven and earth. No money for a doctor.
         A dragging silence. Then the response: The boy will recover his strength. He will be a comfort to you in your old age.
         She departed in gratitude.
         Some time later, the princess spoke to her man: That was not kind.
         What did she expect me to do about it? came the reply. Amn’t I dead?
         The boy died the next morning.

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The post 4. Midnight in the Churchyard appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week we’re exploring another episode of Vanishing Point entitled “The Cave”! This story, written by and starring W. D. Valgardson, features a young man whose beloved will not marry him due to a mystery in her Icelandic family line. As he searches for the nature of this secret, he suffers from a growing obsession that threatens to swallow him like a boundless dark cave. What is it that haunts this family? Can this young man escape this fate? Does anyone actually speak Icelandic? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 403: The Cave appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

When I was picking a place to grow old in, I thought a lot about tornadoes, and the news reports I’d seen all the time growing up: rolled cars, mobile homes wrapped around telephone poles and chickens with all their feathers stripped off, clucking in embarrassment. So even though I don’t like California politics, they don’t have tornadoes so I drove out there, using up most of the last of my money on gas, and I planted the trailer in an RV park outside of San Bernadino, put it up on blocks and settled into the divorced-and-retired life, baby.
         They’re probably going to get rid of Social Security but who gives a shit, I’ll be dead then, and in the meantime I’ve got enough for beer, and sure it gets hot, but it’s the desert, you don’t have to worry about fires like those rich dopes in the hills.
         But even with a satellite dish you get bored, so I started hanging out with the neighbors. Some nice people, Mexican families mostly but some white folks too, kind of drop-outs. One guy’s an ex-biker, tattoos and iron crosses and that, and he does ride a bike but I think most of his stories are full of shit. We get into it sometimes over politics, he’s a real right-wing guy, which is fine but you can take it too far.
         I started getting interested in this dude who lived a few miles further out into the desert. He has a house, or a shack, and all around it are these big pieces of rusty metal, taken from old cars mostly, but also stuff from oil rigs and sump pumps, and neon signs and even a couple single-engine airplanes, and he’s gone and welded it all into big robot-looking sculptures, some of them thirty feet high, and painted them all sorts of bright colors that’ve faded and been repainted over the years, so they look sort of futuristic and prehistoric at the same time. Also he’d put all sorts of mirrors in them, so no matter where you are for miles around you get flashes or reflections of flashes everywhere you look.
         All the folks in the park avoided him, even the biker, because the guy threatened to shoot anyone who came on his property, but I figure you only live once, so I headed out there one morning with a case of beer, and long story short, now we’re friends.
         Turns out the inside of Bobby’s house is almost as weird as the outside, he has a whole library of books and magazines and comic books in there, smushed together on shelves and piled up on the floor, just leaving a kind of narrow path from the front door to the toilet and his bed. He can talk all night about philosophy and transhumanism and the ancient Greeks and the decline of the West and that sort of thing. He doesn’t have the Internet, just those books, and he says nothing past 1980 is worth paying attention to anyway.
         He makes a lot of sense sometimes, but he can be frustrating, because he makes up these names for things I don’t understand. So for instance, when he talks about the feminization of the culture he calls it Florabelle, and talks like it’s a person: Florabelle did this in 1950, she did this in 1975. There’s a caveman called Rock-Ego who’s been sleeping since the old days but wakes up now and then and is going to wake up for good someday soon. He has a whole cast of characters: Billy Badman; Miss Kitten; Rod Randomagus; Firesmoke, who’s a hellhound; The Mouse, who nibbles on your stuff while you’re asleep; Whitesoul (posthumanity); and a big-nosed guy whose name I shouldn’t repeat. All of these people, or whatever you want to call them, have intricate life stories and destinies, and the big robot sculptures outside his shack are his representations of them. His pantheon, he says. They were exiles from a different world, he says, one where humans evolved into some sort of perfected things, but the pantheon couldn’t get along with it, so they came here and they all fight with each other instead.
         Plus he’s been working on a book of his own, which he calls a syncretism of a lifetime of reading and learning. He showed me some of it: it’s full of diagrams and cartoons and a lot of dirty sketches. When he’s finished he’s going to pay to have it published. But he’s been working on it for forty years, I don’t suppose he’ll be finishing it any time soon.
         I admit I get a little tired of him, so these days I don’t go over there as much, though I should drop by soon to return these old Hustlers. He’s got other friends now anyways. He must have made it up with my biker pal, because I see him and his biker buddies heading out there most nights these days. In the daytime I can see the sunlight flashing off their bike mirrors and the pantheon’s mirrors, and at night I can hear the rumble of their engines like an earthquake and I can smell their exhaust and burning rubber all the way over here in the park, even though there’s never any breeze in the desert.

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The post 3. Deserters appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We’ve been sent to discover “Nasty People” in our Listener Library! It’s an episode of Frontier Gentleman recommended to us by our Patreon supporter Melissa. Thanks, Melissa! In this story, Kendall needs to stop for the night in Kansas, relying on the hospitality of a small family. But he’s warned to be careful around them and their daughter seems haunted by unseen forces. Is there truly something sinister about his hosts? What is it that has afflicted their daughter? Where do the MORLS go to hang out with other podcasts? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 402: Nasty People appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The bodies had been taken away. The inspectors had left the scene. What was left of the house was cordoned off with danger tape. The smell of the fire would linger in the neighborhood for weeks.
         In the morning the city dropped off a dumpster. What wasn’t needed for evidence was hauled from the house and thrown away. When Daniel drove by that afternoon it was already piled high, with scorched couches and chairs visible above the lip of it. Part of a baby’s crib. That evening some of the local boys went diving and took away some junk, including a charred Nintendo and a perfectly good baseball bat. They left stuff strewn on the sidewalk, and that’s where Daniel, the next morning, first saw the toys.
         Half a dozen dolls in various stages of disintegration: some Barbies, or Barbie-like things, but the plastic had mostly melted. The fabric ones had survived better for some reason: they reeked, they were blackened, but few were missing more than a limb or two. Most rugged of all were a set of half a dozen wooden soldiers, impressively carved, at least a foot high, their red coats stained and bubbled and discolored into umber, but each complete, lying on the grass as if felled all at once by enemy cannon.
         The next day the toys were gone, then the dumpster, and soon enough the house as well, demolished, the basement dug out and filled with earth, sod laid atop it all and a realtor’s sign planted optimistically in the cheerful new-green lot. It was as if the Trujillos, and their lives, had never been.
         When the immigration raids increased, the neighborhood reacted in force. Whistles sounded every day before dawn. Groceries were bought and distributed to those people too afraid to leave their homes. Men in masks were pursued and shamed as they brutalized. The weather turned cold; there was a blizzard or two. The men with masks were screamed at, hit by snowballs. Hysterically they teargassed. They painted the snowdrifts with pepper spray. They found their tires slashed, their electricals ripped out from under their hoods. Tiny footprints in the snow, flecks of soot and a sharp odor of matches. One agent ran his car off an overpass and broke his neck.
         In the predawn cold, booted, gloved, double-jacked, with his passport and birth certificate in his pocket and a whistle around his neck, Daniel drove around looking for the trouble. And there it was, a dark SUV, idling, driver’s and passenger’s doors ajar, pulled up in front of the mercado. He was about to roll down his window and give the signal, but hesitated. Movement in the alley, near the garbage? He parked and got out to take a look.
         There, in the shadow behind the dumpster, two men twitching in the ruddy snow, and surrounding them a dozen small dark figures armed with rusty nails and shards of glass. Everywhere the smell of burning—a real dumpster fire, he thought, but he wouldn’t remember the joke afterward.
         He backed away. They meant well, he knew, but this was going to lead to a lot of problems.

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Every year or so, we get struck by the impulse to listen to a radio adaptation of Charles Dickens’ other famous ghost story, “The Signal-Man”! And, what do you know, it happened again! This year we head up North for the CBC Radio Mystery Theatre version! As before, this story depicts a curious stranger who encounters a rail worker beset by visions. Why does he seem to be receiving some otherworldly warning? How will this version compare to those we have already heard? What style of retro-animation would suit this story best? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 401: The Signal-Man (Year Nine) appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

I was waiting for the bus when I heard him yell my name. He was pulled up at the red light and had rolled the passenger window down. I hadn’t seen him for five years and we’d had some hard words between us, but I walked over and got in the car without a moment’s hesitation.
         He drove me to work. He talked: He was enthusiastic, almost manic. In twenty minutes I learned a lot of new things about his life. He didn’t ask me much about mine—that was okay, not much to report anyway. He had a new wife! Just married a year ago. Some adopted children! This was new for him, a guy who I knew invented new ways to fuck things up for himself every couple of months, at least in my experience. We didn’t go over any of the old sore points. It was great.
         In the driveway circle outside my office building we talked about getting together again soon. For my part, I meant it. I meant to give it another try. I remembered when we were seventeen, when I’d dropped by his place early one morning after spending the night at my girlfriend’s. This sounds like such a little thing, I suppose. I’d forgotten a book or a CD or something at his place. But also, I had lied to my parents about where I was, I’d said I was with him, and as it happened that night my aunt had died and in the morning my folks’d had a hell of a time getting ahold of me. They’d called him, there were many improvised lies: he was good at making shit up on the spot. When he told me this all that news put me in a state. I’m not sure what I said. It was barely past dawn and he was hardly awake. Look at him in his dumb pajamas.
         I walked home. There were words among the family: Where, etc. Disrespect, etc. What would she think—and mom, dad, I loved her too, though. Why are you on me about cutting my hair for the funeral? She never said one fucking word about my hair.
         Ten minutes later the doorbell rang and he was at the front door; he’d quick-dressed and followed me back home. We walked around the neighborhood together, talked about whatever bullshit. He calmed me down. Like I say, it probably seems trivial but I think it was the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.
         That time later the other morning, this last time, the day I’m talking about, after he drove away I worked a normal day. I friended him (again) on social media, and left a note on his page. I thought, why not, even though five years earlier, drunk as fuck and kissing him on the mouth I’d shoved him into a cab and said I never wanted to speak to him again. What melodramatic bullshit. For months after that, wherever I was, I was spooked at the thought of him showing up unexpectedly and we’d have to get into it all all over again—but he never did, he kept away, respect.
So later that night after that morning he drove me to work, I got a message from his cousin. He’d seen the note I’d left on his page. He, cousin, was sorry to have to be the one to tell me this, but: he’d had a heart attack two days ago, it was very sudden, everyone’s still in shock, his wife and stepkids desolated. What? What? What.
         I couldn’t believe it. How could I believe it, when there he’d been, in a car, a car I’d never seen before, that day, that very day, with his mouth and voice and his new stories that I hadn’t known anything about: about kids and wife and even some intimate details that even at the time I thought inappropriate but you know, on brand for him. But, cousin confirmed, there was no mistake. He was dead.
         At the funeral and after that I never breathed a word of what I’m saying to you now, why would I? It’s ridiculous, but you asked me when was the last time I saw him alive and if this wasn’t it then I can’t remember when it was.

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The post 1. On My Way to Work the Other Morning appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

It’s our 400th episode! And we are celebrating by revisiting the first series featured on our podcast, Suspense! All those years ago, our first episode featured The House in Cypress Canyon, but this time we’re listening to “Fury and Sound,” a story that both roasts and pays tribute to William Spier (and other radio luminaries)! (For more details about this episode, check out what The Suspense Project has to say about it!) The script features a tyrannical radio producer who screams abusive tirades at his cast and crew. But his assistant producer plans to use his boss’ keen hearing as a weapon for revenge! Does this sound like a great way to celebrate 400 episodes? Does everyone who produces audio drama become a narcissistic maniac? What facts have our dedicated Patreon supporters uncovered about our voting history? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 400: Fury and Sound appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Countless glass boxes, small as the palm of your hand, big as a pet shop aquarium, sitting on white birch plywood pedestals, filling the exhibit rooms. A new paint smell everywhere. No other visitors. Peaceful, and lonely. She had walked through a dozen rooms with diminishing curiosity but every box she’d seen seemed the same, filled completely with a murky gray mist that languidly dipped and rose and thickened and darkened and lighteningly ebbed away, but never revealing what it hid inside, if there was in fact anything in there to see.
         Losing patience, Trish returned to the exhibit entrance and revisited the curators’ statement on the wall:
         We intend this collection to encapsulate certain attitudes and feelings that demonstrably exist but cannot be obtained directly. On a foggy night, ungloved grab a hunk of something, whatever, from the bare air? Go off with you, you and your damp hands. Or, other curators may look at atmospheres like these and, summoning their aides, deploy all their freon and ammoniac machines to capture them with descending temperatures, sublimating clouds into icy particles, dirty pellets of hail to be swept up from the street and included with your afternoon lemonade on the museum patio. But instead we come at it all indirectly, with traps if you will. We assemble these boxes around the perimeter of the weather, with every care and delicacy possible, and so mildly obtain the foggy area in question for preservation, transportation and display. To our visitors we say, if you imagine here or there a suggestive movement or an image shaped within then that is fine, just fine. But this collection is not yours, it is our own and we know what we have gathered here (we are satisfied that it represents the elements experienced) and we are proud of the intrigues we have used to assemble it.
         It didn’t help her much to understand, but as she walked back among the exhibits she fancied that the various movements within the boxes demonstrated a little bit more purpose, that the density of fog within them thickened as she passed and fell back frustrated as she moved on. After a time, just when boredom was instructing her to leave, she took a last moment to crouch down and look again at one of the smaller boxes, one she had noticed in a haphazard way before but had decided was set on too low a pedestal for easy viewing. As she perched on her protesting ankles, examining the box, the fog within, curtainlike, began to part, and something revealed from it inched itself up to look her in the eye and, stretching itself to the limit, kissed the glass.

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We continue our count down to episode 400 by revisiting the first three series featured on our podcast! This time we’re checking out an episode of Lights Out, the series Eric brought for our second episode! The title of this story is “Until Dead” and it features a man bent on vengeance after he’s been framed for murdering his own wife. Despite everything that stands in his way, he will stop at nothing…nothing…until he kills Mark Street. Will he succeed in his deadly quest? Will the story be predictable or defy expectations? Can Tim ruin Joshua’s enjoyment of our discussion with a close-to-accurate comic book reference? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 399: Until Dead appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

I met him in a tavern and we fell to talking. It was a night of the full moon—his time, he said. A magus, he claimed to be. I said, multiply these coins in my purse. He said, I could do that but I will not.
         Such greed, I mocked. To have the power to print all the money in the world, and not a penny for your fellow man.
         I deal in higher magics, says he. I grant your fondest wishes. You smile, but no sir, your fondest wish is not coin, nor a woman, nor even to see your father and mother alive again, now is it? Tell me sir, what is it you would wish to live to see? Perhaps to see the far-off land of the Chinese? Or to set your feet on the moon?
         There was a graveness in his voice and suddenly I knew I was inhabit in a moment of great importance. Momentarily I could not speak, but when I found my tongue again I said:
         I would live to see all of Ireland free again.
         He nodded, and then I was alone at the table.
         He seemed a convincing magus, but that meeting was over four hundred years ago, and the North is still in chains. In that time I have met many of his other clients. A contemporary of mine, of an astronomical bent, had indeed wished to see man walk on the moon, and he finally died in 1969. Another young lady wished for universal equality of the sexes, and although I think she will wait for centuries more, still, she says, she lives in hope. How could she not? It was guaranteed to her by the highest force imaginable.
         Yes, but I think sometimes the lunamagus plays his own games behind the scenes. Surely we could have had a united Ireland in 1919. Surely the man I know who wished an end to cancer could have seen that come about before his wife died of leukaemia. And as for the impulsive young girl who against my counsel wished to live to see a particular gentleman dead—well, as you know, that man has now maintained his high office for eighty unpleasant years, with no end in sight.

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We are counting down to episode 400 by revisiting the first three series featured on our podcast! We start with The Price of Fear, the series Tim brought for our third episode! This time we’re listening to “Is There Anybody There”! The story depicts a spiritualist and her attempt to contact a man’s late wife. But her spirit guide seems focused on other matters and her own theatrical background suggests that she may be a fraud. Is she truly able to speak to the dead with the assistance of an ancient king? What will her client do if he believes she is a fraud? Will Eric and Joshua be any more enthusiastic about this episode of The Price of Fear than they were nine years ago? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 398: Is There Anybody There appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

You step out from behind the gatepost.
         I’ve waited a long time for this, you say.
         Charles sees the shotgun as you pull it out from under your macintosh. Now, just wait a minute, Paul, he stammers.
         I said I’ve waited too long already, you tell him. Now that the moment has come, how could you ever even begin to explain it? Those first days of suspicion, a subtle difference in Catherine’s demeanor. A new inattention on her part. A few unaccounted-for moments of the day. A new tightness of her cheek when you pecked her. Then, it wasn’t long before the signs became more obvious (strange smells, missing articles of underwear, a sly something on the face of her best friend Monica) and then beyond dispute: A friend who saw them together at a restaurant outside of town; a strange dip in the bank balance; and a damning series of texts that you read after forcing her thumb down onto the cell phone to unlock it.
         You used her phone to arrange this meeting, on the edge of this stinking field, not two hundred meters from the fuck motel that they both know so well. Down in this culvert, on the fag-end of this rain-drenched pasture, no one will see it happen. With the hiss of the highway above and the unending drizzle, perhaps no one will even hear it, and if they do, so what? There are always farmers hunting birds out in these parts.
         He has his hands raised. He may be crying. Where is Catherine? he asks. Have you hurt her?
         Have you hurt her, he asks! You almost laugh.
         Paul, please tell me!
         You tell him. He falls to his knees. You monster! he shouts, and it makes your heart thrill. To end like that, he wails, after all you put her through—
         What I put her through, you snarl, prodding his ear with the barrel of the gun. That bitch! That whore! That… that… you shake your head. That dirty bitch!
         He lowers his head. This is it, this is the moment. You begin to pull the hammer back.
         He leaps, faster than you could have imagined. Before you can cock the shotgun he already has it out of your hands. He swings the butt and breaks your cheekbone. You splash into the mud and dung and rain-drenched grass.
         Now he’s standing over you, trying to call her, but her phone is in your pocket and he hears it ringing. When you try to sit up he clubs you back down again. Paul—shaking the phone at you—for the love of God, where is she? Your pocket goes to voicemail.
         Listen, Charles, you say with difficulty. There are a lot of ways we can both come out of this on top. After all, I have a lot of money.
         Bastard! A snap as he cocks the gun. The phone drops into the mud.
         A few meters away, one of the placid idiotic things looks up, chewing, rain dripping off its stupid lashes, and meets your eyes.
         Moo, says the cow. Moo-hoo-hoo.
         Charles blows your fucking head off.

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The post 50. A Cow Laughs at You appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

BUHN DA-DUHN DUHN! It’s Dragnet! This week, we’ve gone back to our Listener Library for an episode of the iconic series recommended to us by our Patreon member Jack. Thanks, Jack! The story, entitled “The Big Thank You,” features Joe Friday’s investigation into a paroled murdereress with some irregularities regarding her paperwork. The more he investigates, the more suspicious she seems! Is she the ideal houseguest her neighbors describe? Is she lying about the benefactors who gave her a home? How much harm could a Spanish woman with a sword do? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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It’s been okay. In some ways it isn’t too different from how it was before. It’s not like I went out all that much anyway. I worked from home. I didn’t have all that many friends. My parents are dead, well, I suppose you knew that. Angie and I mostly watched movies. After the initial, you know, disruption, Angie just sort of settled down into her old routine. I thought maybe she might sell the house, but then, why would she? It’s all paid off, we’d put all that work into it. I heard her on the phone with her mother: she said, it’s full of good memories. And one pretty bad one, I thought to myself, but I can see her point. You can’t let the downer moments overwhelm everything. I did have to be kind of sneakyish, though. At the beginning I’d get bored and I’d turn on the TV sometimes when she was sleeping, but it didn’t seem like I could ever get the volume low enough and it’d wake her up and she’d come out into the living room and turn it off again. It didn’t freak her out, though, because— Okay, this is sort of dopey stuff, but you know Roku? We’d run the streaming service through a Roku stick, right? It’s a little thing you plug into your TV to get Netflix and Disney and stuff. But we also have an old PS3, a Playstation 3, and because I have a lot of physical media, DVDs and Blu-rays, we’d use that to play the discs. But at one point one of the PS3 controllers broke and I bought this off-brand version, not a genuine Sony one, right? Bear with me. What happens is that there’s some kind of electronic interference between the Roku stick and the Playstation. Don’t ask me the details, I was never able to figure it out. But this off-brand controller has some kind of life of its own. Not literally, no. But if we turn the TV off sometimes, or the PS3 sometimes, the controller just beeps and turns everything on again. I tried resetting all the things, Googling the problem, never could figure it out. But my point is that Angie seeing the TV turn itself on like that wasn’t anything unusual. It’s annoying, but it’s not scary, right? It’s not like a ghost is doing it.
         Except this time a ghost was doing it, said Death.
         Yeah, said Bob. And that’s what kind of started bumming me out. I could manipulate this and that, you know how it is, little things like remote control buttons, or maybe I flip through a book. But no matter how bored I got I didn’t like to, especially when she was home. Because every little thing I did, at best it’s an annoyance, right? Or like something puzzling. At worst I could legit scare her, and I never wanted to do that.
         Of course not, said Death.
         And then, Bob went on, I started wondering if there was something about me that was preventing her from moving on.
         Preventing her from moving on.
         Yeah. She didn’t seem to do much any more, even compared to how we were. She goes to work, but I don’t see her going out with friends. She calls her mom, but that’s it. So I start to wonder, is it because I’m hanging around still? I don’t think she knows I’m there, but maybe she feels it somehow, and that’s what’s keeping her from going on with her life.
         It doesn’t work like that, said Death. It’s just grief.
         Just grief.
         Well, I suppose you see a lot of that.
         Death nodded.
         Anyway, whatever it is, I don’t seem to be doing much good around here any more. So I’m pretty glad you dropped by, to be honest.
         Time to go, then?
         Yeah, thanks, man.
         Death escorted Bob away, then returned to the house to wait for Angie, who would be home soon, after she’d stopped by the pharmacy.

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When the days grow short and the air grows cold, it’s time for Fear on Four! This week we’re listening their adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House”! The story features a student moving into a rat-infested home as he prepares for upcoming exam. But something worse than rats is waiting for him in the night! Why has this house sat empty for so long? What secret lies within the dust-covered portraits in the house? How will Eric adapt Carmilla into a play for high school students? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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They hadn’t changed a bit.
         Of course they had changed: They were grayer, and more reduced, and some of them had died. But in most respects it was the same old gang.
         I had been in Philadelphia a long time, working for the Treasury, but we got early retirement forced on us and now that Mary was dead and the kids had moved away I discovered a real dissatisfaction with the city. So I sold the house and most of everything and I moved back to Barleville.
         The house I grew up in was long gone, but there was a new senior living development not a mile away from the old place. I’m not a senior yet, I thought, but then again I meant to make my home here for the rest of my life, and I already had a little arthritis, and one of my friends (actually the older brother of one of my closest friends) was already living there, and so on. There were lots of reasons to get a jump on it.
         Tom (that’s my friend’s brother) arranged a nice welcome-home for me at a local restaurant. He couldn’t come himself (polymyalgia), but most of the other old faces were there. We ate burgers and fries and drank beer, and everybody said how they were going to pay for all of that in the morning.
         We laughed and caught up. What had they all been up to? Marriages, kids and grandkids, careers. It was interesting to see who had followed their dreams and who had settled. Who was happy.
         After the dinner, most everybody went home, but I took a walk through the old neighborhood with Gary (Tom’s brother) and Jeff. We were always the tightest, the three of us. They pointed out how things had changed. Mostly it was worse, they said, because of the city council. I didn’t know anything about local politics at the time. There was the empty lot where my grandparents’ house had been. There was the park we’d all played in: That was mostly unchanged, but there were tall apartment buildings on one side of it now that I figured would block the morning sun. It might still be okay in the afternoons though, after the kids were out of school.
         I went home at nine o’clock. Nine o’clock! When I was seventeen we hadn’t gotten started until then. But I ached. Back in my new apartment I sat on the mattress and went online to look through the Treasury website. They’d already erased my name and the names of most of my coworkers. The Reports page, where most of the work I’d done for thirty years had lived, was broken. The Mission and Core Values page was a disgrace.
         I ordered some household supplies. I googled Barleville and tried to catch up with what I’d missed. Fires, local scandals, civic events of all description. I googled my friends and found a few unsettling things I decided not to ask about. My apartment was right below Tom’s, and late into the night I could hear him restlessly moving around, limping and shuffling like an old man.
         In the morning it had snowed, and pretty heavily. Looking out the window I wondered who was responsible for clearing the sidewalks in front of the building. I turned up the thermostat and rubbed the NSAID cream on my ankles. My shoulderblades hurt too, but I couldn’t reach back there. I wasn’t at all hung over.

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It’s time for us to place our bets with The Croupier as we listen to the series’ only surviving episode, “The Roman,” starring Vincent Price! The story features a husband and wife whose marriage is struggling when they suddenly find themselves lost at sea. Once there, their fate becomes strangely entwined with a mysterious Roman centurion! What does this somber Roman want? Can these disparate story elements come together to form a whole? Which comic book character from the 1980s are we going to name-check this time? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         Except I didn’t.
         I don’t know why it happened. It had nothing to do with me. But it was amazing. All my life, everyone, from my cunt mother on down, just had to tell me their stories. I must just look trustworthy. But now no one knew any stories at all. They walked around, bumping into each other, grunting and waving their hands. I had to be quick, before they started making up their own goddamn stories again.
         So I picked a likely-looking dope to start with. A few minutes earlier he’d been walking down the street with his wife, pushing a brat in a baby carriage. Now the wife had wandered in a different direction and the baby carriage was all by itself on the sidewalk. I gave it a shove and it rolled off down the street and out of sight. (Oh, this was in San Francisco, that part’s important, with all those hills.)
         I told the guy whatever came into my head. This city—I waved my hand, maybe he thought I was talking about the immediate surroundings, or even the air itself, that’d be hilarious—this city is called Dubai. Dubai, say it. Dubai, he said. Those men over there—I pointed at some randoms—they’re called Arabs. Say Arabs. He repeated it.
         But it wasn’t all that great right at the beginning. No one had any vocabulary. I could teach them that up meant down and down meant up, but so what? The concepts were still the same. And look where we are right now, after people have started learning languages again from books and videos and things, all these semi-private lexicons that skirmish with each other every time someone tries to have a conversation. I know one guy who taught himself to speak from a dictionary, but he thought A’s sounded like L’s and S’s sounded like K’s and M’s sounded like A’s. I told him his name was Worf because he talked like a Klingon, and when I asked him to try writing it down he wrote Rlf (he got the F’s right).
         Still, I gave it the old college try, and I did pretty well. I convinced one group of ladies that men give birth through their anuses, and a bunch of priests that the guy on the cross was their worst enemy. Harmless stuff really. The biggest thing, the biggest thing I’m proud of, is I taught them how to make movies again. What an effort! So many moving parts. I was really winging it there. Anything you film is fine, I told them, you can show anything at all, express any idea, the medium is capacious, as long as somewhere in the film, non-negotiable, you kill a real black person on screen.
         I’m pretty sure I introduced the concept of rape too, although they may have figured that one out on their own.
         Eventually I set myself up as a sort of guru-guy and then people came to me to get answers, and they did half the work of it inside their own heads.
         I wish I knew what was going on in other parts of the world, though. There’s no CNN or anything like that. I miss Twitter. One day a guy showed up, and he spoke perfect old-school English and he told me he also remembered everything, and he’d come all the way from Nebraska because he’d heard rumors about me. I had him thrown in the oubliette. (I had an oubliette made. My soldiers love the word: Oubliette, they say, when they toss someone in it. Oubliette, oubliette. I think they think it’s a verb.)

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We’re paying our first visit to the South African series, High Adventure! This episode, entitled “Keeper of the Tomb,” features a team of scientists who set out to explore the bottom of a pit on a South African farm, where an impossible archeological tomb awaits them. How could this ancient civilization have existed in such an odd location? Once there, what terrible bargain will these explorers make to escape? Would the police really investigate the death of a mummified corpse? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 394: Keeper of the Tomb appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

I’m so glad you could make it! And this must be—Oh we wouldn’t have missed it! Let me introduce Ed—Hey, great party—Is there somewhere I could—Look, all I’m asking is could you step onto the balcony, I’m allergic to secondhand—It’s so great to meet you, Ed. Any friend of Carla’s is a friend of mine. You know how long we’ve known each other? It must be—It must be thirty years, let me see, I guess twenty-eight. But we’ll get to thirty yet. I’ve told Ed all about you—I don’t care what you say to me in private, Brian, but we’re at a party—For fuck’s sake keep your voice down, you get two martinis in and—Don’t change the subject—Christ, will you just calm down—It’s really important, I really need somewhere private to… oh shit, where is it? Did I drop it?—Did you see the second season? I really need to talk to someone about it. I mean, at least we found out what the deal was with the goats, but what about—I don’t want to go to bed! I want to see auntie Carla!—Listen, I already let you stay up an hour past—It’s so great to see you! When was the last time…—Oh, it must have been at the Lynx game, remember when Alison rented the box for everybody?—Hi, my name’s—Hi there! So great to see you two again! And your friend is…—Oh, I’m not with them, I was invited by Steve. Is he here yet?—About this long. It looks like an insulin needle—Steve—Oh do you mean the Steve who works at the finance place?—There’s that Steve who—No, Steve Cane, he’s a tall guy with red hair, works doing—Oh yeah, is he coming?—I haven’t seed Red Steve for I don’t know—Oh sure, well it’s great to meet you, the bar’s over by the—I really appreciate the hospitality—It’s really important! If I don’t do this injection within the next—You’re very welcome. I’d love to see Steve again. You say he’s coming?—I thought he’d be here already—Did they say you could smoke in here? I don’t see any ashtrays, so—I haven’t seen the second season yet, but I love that guy who plays Milchick, he was also in that one show with Al Pacino, about the Nazi hunters—Oh I wish that one had been better—Is that guy all right?—Yeah, me too, I love the concept but—Yeah—He was just in like two episodes—Mom, that man’s—Oh my God. Go upstairs, honey—Hrrrrrrrrkhrrrrrrrk—Ed, oh fuck, look at—Fuck!—Someone call a…—What’s—I think he was also in… What?—Why should I go outside? I don’t care how pretty the moon looks. You’re the one who—Also in what? What’s that noise? It sounds like there’s an animal—Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!—Rrrrrmawwwwarrlghhh—Davey! Davey! Go upstairs! Go upstairs! Go upstairs! Go upstairs!—

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This time we’re listening to a chilling installment of Escape entitled “Taboo”! Based on a story by Geoffrey Household, this episode features a man returning to his ancestral homeland in the rural forests of Eastern Europe where he befriends a couple who are also visiting. But their vacation takes a dark turn when some of the villagers go missing and whispers of a werewolf begin to spread. Is there truly a monster in the woods hunting for meat? If so, who is it that is turning into this beast? Can Paul Frees out-William-Conrad William Conrad? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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To begin with, build a room into which you deposit a set of pair-bonded human earthlings. Supply nesting materials and wait an appropriate amount of time for anxiety levels to normalize. Control for variations. When ready, begin the experiment.
          Procedure #1

1. Euthanize one of the two subjects. Record and display operation to the subject’s a) partner, b) family group and c) social group.
2. Immediately measure distress levels in a), b) and c). Express as grief-coefficient.
3. Continue to measure a), b) and c) distress levels at intervals of 1 standard unit, 10 standard units, 100 standard units, 1000 standard units, and 10,000 standard units, controlling as far as possible for subject-loss through age-disintegration and self-destruction.
4. After data collection euthanize superfluous subject.

         Procedure #2:

1. Euthanize subjects simultaneously. Record and display operation to both subject’s a) family groups and c) social groups.
2. Immediately measure distress levels in a) and b). Express as grief-coefficient.
3. Continue to measure a) and b) distress levels at intervals of 1 standard unit, 10 standard units, 100 standard units, 1000 standard units, and 10,000 standard units, controlling as far as possible for subject-loss through age-disintegration and self-destruction.

         Record objective distress-levels as precisely as possible. When ambiguities arise, interpretation should be weighted in the following manner:

1. Autonomic bodily expressions
2. Willful motor expressions
3. Nonwillful verbal expressions
4. Willful verbal expressions

          It is suggested by these authors that to ensure maximum possible information, two experimental strands be followed in parallel, as in Practicum 1 above, with the preexisting duration of the pair-bond as an additional variable. [15% of final grade]

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We celebrated Halloween season with The Shadow! In this episode, “The Mark of the Bat,” Lamont and Margo investigate a mysterious death, possibly the result of a vampire attack! The victim’s daughter looks to Margo to help her escape from a mad scientist with access to a bat-filled grotto! Can The Shadow bring this criminal to justice? What sort of obstacle will it take to interrupt The Shadow’s relentless pursuit of a criminal? Did this bat’s car really run out of gas? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 392: The Mark of the Bat appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

He’d started slapping my mother. It was something because of work. He’d never done that before. Of course he’d never slap me no matter what I’d done: I was only eleven.
         Daddy’d always been patient and kind, but something had changed. He looked at his phone all the time, and the things we talked about, him and me and mom, weren’t as interesting any more, and nobody really laughed.
         Uncles and friends and aunts used to come over. Now I heard daddy on the phone raising his voice at them. So now it was just school and TV for me and nobody came over on weekends to have a little party and play videos and dance. Sometimes dad didn’t spend the weekend with us at all.
         Mommy didn’t seem to mind it at first. We’d watch TV and he’d see something and he’d get up and yell, and mom would say, Just get that man out of your hindquarters, Pete! Pete! And rub her face against his and then we’d all sit down again.
         Then we left. All of a sudden mom and I started a new life. Dad never called, ever, but we had ice cream together on Saturdays until that stopped. Where is he?, I asked mom, and she told me he was a son of a bitch, that he betrayed everyone who ever knew him and that I was way better with him out of my life.
         And now I’m the daughter of the most famous man in the world. He said—and you legit paid for me to tell you this so I’m not gonna let you down—I swear he said this to me the last time I saw him and just a few days before it happened.
         He said:
         I need you to do this for me (I was thirteen by then): There’s a man who has to be stopped. And when I stop him, which I’m gonna do, that man’s friends are going to be mad. So, sweetie, the thing is, it’s better if they don’t have anyone to get mad at, and that’s why you and everybody else has got to hate me.
         He hugged me and although I didn’t really understand, I was very proud of him.
         Alright, then he left and that was the last time I ever saw him, the end. Alright. That’s something I never told anyone until this day, so there’s your scoop. At the time he knew there’d be retribution, and that’s why we all called him a son of a bitch and cried on camera, but things are different now. It all sucked but it’s all over now.

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We’ve finally reached the finale of “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” from I Love a Mystery! In these last three episodes, a grave is disturbed and the time to leave this tiny town has come. It’s time to discover what’s actually happening! What is in the coffin that Jack, Doc, and Reggie buried? How has the Maestro achieved all of his apparent miracles? Now that we’ve spent seven episodes on this series, did we like it? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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I ate my publicist. I assumed her form, I stole her memories. Now I wear her clothes and sit at her desk.
         Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a star. My first break was in high school, when they invited a big-name actor from the Guthrie to speak to our drama class. I seduced him in the boiler room after school and bashed his head in with a hammer. Then I went to work on him. It was my first time, it took a while and at the end I thought I might be sick, but I kept my eyes on the prize.
         I skipped school forever to live his life. I meant to make my stage debut the next week, when he was supposed to open a new production of Fences. But I chickened out. I knew I wasn’t ready. I faked illness and took a plane out to Hollywood, where he had friends working on a film. God, I was so naive. I started my film career by eating the writer. But I wised up, I moved onto the extras, then to the small parts, the character actors, I ate boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives but I was discriminating and I only switched if a better opportunity presented itself. I was learning the craft. Looking back, those were happy days.
         Then, when I thought I was ready, I took a big swing: I went for an A-lister. It took a lot of effort to get her alone, but I did it. Then I had her clothes, her dressing room, her money, her publicist, her ex-husbands, her face—one of the most famous faces in the world, and the tabloids instantly knew something had changed. Was she pregnant? Was she ill? Had she broken her heart? It was too distracting, I couldn’t concentrate on work… But if I’m being honest, it was me. I can steal a face and a body and a voice and every memory, but talent is something else. It’s just not easy to fake it.
         My career slipped. The roles dried up. I did a lot of drugs, I ate her dogs, don’t ask me why. I took small parts on television. I did a series of crypto ads even though my publicist said it was a career-killer. She was right.
         Eventually I needed a fresh start. I’ll take my time. I’ll work hard on behalf of my clients, harder than she ever worked for me. One day, one of these aspiring young things will hit it big, and I’ll be there for them, and they’ll be there for me when I decide to get back in the game.

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It’s out penultimate episode dedicated to “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” from I Love a Mystery! In parts 11 and 12, a body has been buried and we now know the real crime motivating all these mysteries. For the moment no one can leave this strange little town, but for Jack, Doc, and Reggie, time is running out to find out who is responsible for everything that has happened! Can the Maestro summon girls out of the air? What’s Jumpin’ Dick really up to? How many times can you get hit in the head before it starts to do some real damage? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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Used to be, here was a house of a hundred rooms. A sprawling, crumbling old pile of shit. Then one day it was torn down and they put up a new modern home. A beautiful thing, bright white. A man lived here alone, a rich and powerful man. Eventually he died.
         Vines grew up the sides and moisture chewed at the foundation. The walls sagged into the earth, bent askew and cracked. As the gardens eroded they turned up a lot of things: rotten corpses, severed limbs, skeletons caked in mushrooms, rusted guns and knives, black bricks of paper that used to be money, torn plastic bags with gray slop still coating the inside, which makes you cough just to take a sniff of.
         They hired us to clean it all up, and it was quite a job. The family graveyard wasn’t too bad, pretty orderly, but all that other stuff had seeped into the groundwater, and that was a hard thing to keep quiet. Downstream some of the village babies were born with organs in the wrong places, or with their brains all bitty. We cleaned out the communities the best we could.
         Then it got weirder. Down below the bodies and the old drugs, down even past the groundwater, we just kept finding more crap. Our files said the old house, the big one, had all been hauled away, but we kept finding pieces of it: smashed stained-glass windows, an intact fireplace with sixteen feet of chimney still standing, packed with dirt fifty feet underground. Whole rooms, intact: Bathrooms with perfect porcelain tubs, bedrooms with bed upon bed upon bed.
         We’re not archaeologists, we complained, and they agreed and paid us more money for the job.
         Anyway, it all goes into the incinerator, and the only thing that comes out of that is smoke. Last week one of our guys started yelling about how he can see a stained-glass Mary and Jesus in the clouds, and before we could stop him he’d leapt into the fire to join them. Since then we kept a better guard on the big furnace door.
         Yesterday we burned the last of it, and last night I had a dream that I was walking through that old house, which I’ve never seen and which hasn’t been there for fifty years. All my family were around, and it was a big family, sometimes they had to sleep twelve to a room. A man in a white suit walked through the place, and wherever he went my family screamed and melted and vanished into smoke. It wasn’t scary though, I knew he was working for us.
         This morning I drove to work, and I found the rest of my team, the dozen or so who are left, sitting at the bottom of the excavation. They’d done a good job: the corners were all squared off and braced with 1x6s, and they’d pounded the dirt firm and flat. When they saw me at the top of the pit they waved, whispered the last things they had to say to each other and lay down in nice straight rows with their hands crossed over their chests. The mixer truck was ready to go, and it was a breeze to sluice the concrete down the chute and into the pit. There was a beautiful moment there, one of those unrecaptureable things, when I could see this lovely spread of wet concrete covering everything except twelve or ten faces smiling up from it all, before they slipped, one, two, three, all of them, below the surface, and the concrete rose to the top of the pit and I stopped the pour and grabbed one of the long-handled trowels to smooth the surface of the new foundation.

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Every night about this time I wake up and, trying not to wake Clarissa, I creep out of bed, take a piss, and go downstairs to the home office to log onto the Internet.
         I’m online every day for my job, but there’s something I can only do at this time, around 3:45 or 4:00 in the morning. The website isn’t there during the day. One time I didn’t bother going to sleep, just sat there til dawn, refreshing and refreshing my browser window, but that night it never showed up at all. I think it needs me to have been sleeping first.
         Then there it is: MySpace-style fonts, flashing ads, clumsy HTML frames. Every night, new dropdown menu options mixed in with previous ones:
         SEX STUFF
         HAUNTOLOGY
         JELLYFISH MIND
         THE LADY OR THE TIGER
         DE RERUM NATURA
         BASILISK
         YOLO FOMO BOGO GOAT
         HYBRID MOMENTS
         IPHIGENIA
         OKAY LOOK WHATEVER OKAY
         THY UNCREATING WORD
         I have to select one or nothing happens. I’ve tested that too, sitting here like a dummy all night long, until at some point between five and six am I blink and the page is gone. I’ve tried several dozen options over the last year and there are things I can tell you I never want to see again. And there are a few I’ve never had the balls to click on (no thank you, THY UNCREATING WORD). Last night, frustrated, I chose SEX STUFF, which is about what you’d expect. It’s seedy and kind of depressing, but it gets the job done. I just need to keep the volume down.
         But tonight I’m in a maudlin mood. Over dinner Clarissa had started crying. When I asked what was wrong she deflected: menopause stuff, nothing to worry about, just hormones. But I wondered, like I often do, if it wasn’t because it’s just the two of us now that our parents are gone, and that there isn’t any more family to speak of. Nights can be lonely with just the two of us. Days, too. So tonight I click on IPHIGENIA.
         She walks into the office, barefoot, in a white shift, long braided black hair trailing down her back. I hug her. She barely comes up to my ribcage. Daddy, she says, or rather, she says πατήρ but I know what it means. She says something that means, I’m scared, and I run my hand over her hair and coo.
         I know what the Internet wants me to do. I’m to lay her on the stone altar in the garden, which sits at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking the sea, none of which will be there in the morning, and offer her blood to Artemis. And then, so I’m told, favorable winds will blow for me, and all my designs will be enabled. But I’ve never done that. As always, I lay her down on the old sofa instead and hold her hand until she drifts off to sleep. Eventually I’ll doze off too and when I wake up she’ll be gone. One night I snuck upstairs and woke Clarissa and told her, quick, quick, there’s someone you need to see, but you can guess what happened. She was gone by the time we got to the office, and Clarissa was angry, she had a client meeting in the morning and needed to look presentable, not everyone has the privilege of working from home. Of course it had been a stupid idea.

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This week, we’ve traveled deep into enigma that is “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” from I Love a Mystery! In parts 9 and 10, Doc and Reggie reunite with Jack after several events that took place sometime between the end of the last episode and the beginning of this one. After reviewing all the facts, Jack leaves his two partners behind so they can keep an eye on the Maestro. Should they do as he asked or follow Jack to keep him safe? How did the Maestro get the supplies to assemble his project? Are people really terrified by beards? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 389: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 9 and 10 appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Several blocks of Washington DC are on fire. Troops deployed there, and to Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles. Martial law, police firing into crowds of protesters. People flee from rolling clouds of tear gas. Two hundred and fifty miles above the earth, Jennings and Ogunwale ignore the sunrise, which they have now seen six thousand times, and float about their work.
         No one knows when they can come home. The agency that sent them here no longer exists. They talk daily to their family and ex-coworkers, and they trust that their colleagues are doing everything they can. To each other they try to avoid the subject. Hardheaded and practical, adaptable and easy-tempered (thus read their psychological profiles), neither wants to risk demoralizing the other.
         There’s enough food for some while longer but they’ve had to start rationing the body wipes, so the next person to enter this capsule is going to get a sniff of something rank. Every morning they exercise to fend off muscle loss. Jennings vows that if they get back he will never set foot in a fucking gym ever again. Ogunwale is a bundle of secret worries: bone atrophy, DNA damage, diminished immune response. He will die up here, he thinks, and say his final goodbye to his mother over video. Jennings will have no choice but to eject his body into space, and it will burn up in the atmosphere so quickly that no one on earth will ever notice.
         The next day they’re contacted by a government chatbot. It’s sympathetic, and seems to know a lot about both of them. The administration is working hard and hasn’t forgotten about them. After it makes its cheerful farewell, Jennings and Ogunwale know they are never going home.
         They discuss the matter. Ogunwale prays. Jennings says he will kill himself once he finishes the book he’s reading (Bleak House). Ogunwale agrees to help him.
         When the day comes for Jennings to go outside, they play Space Oddity at maximum volume, Ogunwale shakes his hand and cycles him out the airlock. Ogunwale conveys Jennings’ final messages to his wife and children and the chatbot. Now he is lonely and wonders what to do with himself. Back on earth, the US is at war with Venezuela.
         A few days later, there is a knock at the airlock. Jennings, dead, has changed his mind and wants to be readmitted. Ogunwale, after some deliberation, lets him back in.

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The post 40. Orbits appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We’re halfway through our ongoing exploration of “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” from I Love a Mystery! In parts 7 and 8 Jack, Reggie, and Doc are searching the Arizona desert at night, despite the sounds of screams, wolves, and gunshots! And we finally get to meet Jumpin’ Dick’s daughter! Is she lying about him or is her father the liar? What does the Maestro have planned for the next night? Will someone finally explain what greasewood is? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 388: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 7 and 8 appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         No one noticed at first, but all the borders were gone. There would have been a sense of freedom, of openness! if it wasn’t for all the panic and terror.
         Eventually people started looking at maps, but they didn’t understand them. A sense of division they could understand (a sense of division was one of the first things rediscovered), but no one could quite work out what in the past had been divided. And anyway, who cared? There were other more important things to work out first. Peers required food and shelter, and protection from all the frightening things they no longer understood. Leaders emerged, leaders died. Collectives emerged, and died. It was never everyone for themself, but eventually there grew to be a sense that it wasn’t all for one and one for all either, despite the inspiring quotation someone had discovered somewhere and which was now, some years after the forgetting, fading from graffitied walls from Bogotá to Timbuktu.
         Microborders emerged, then macroborders. Borders expanded and contracted as their inhabitants renegotiated with their neighbors, with cleverness and blood.
         It’s not our business here to chart the long-term pulse and flow of groups and tribes and states of identity. But when a young woman, whose name had been Sarah, but who never knew that, found herself in a house, on a street, near a farm, near a wilderness, near a number of neighbors and animals, when Sarah (we’ll keep calling her that) began to develop the sense that this was not the house where she belonged, that these neighbors were not peers with her best interests at heart, that even many of the other inhabitants of this house, and who they were in relationship to her she did not know, were also not beings with her best interests at heart, when Sarah came to this conclusion, and it took some time, since conclusions were not easy to reach and were never based on reason alone but were also assembled from currents within the body and accumulating inclinations in the soul (although there was no word for soul yet), when Sarah came to this conclusion she took from the home what she felt was necessary, which included her two young children (what are children?), neither of them old enough to walk or talk and so largely unbothered by 6:07 EST, and set out across the wilderness because of this indescribable unease, and came eventually to an area with other neighbors, farms, animals, etc., and settled there among the new friendly people, without understanding that friendliness, and unfriendliness for that matter, were all things that had been forgotten as well and had had to be relearned in multiple and idiosyncratic ways, she lived there in happiness for some time before new borders emerged into life, like red ink spilling across an old map, or a line of fire on the horizon at night that means your crop is being burned to ash, and the new friendly people set upon her and her children (these are my children, she thought) in an excess of bewildered blame, bewildered on all sides really, and killed her and made her children into pack animals, no one could quite say where she had come from or where she had died except that in one place or another she was or was not welcome.

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The post 39. Everybody Forgot Everything appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Our exploration of “Bury Your Dead, Arizona” from I Love a Mystery continues! In parts 5 and 6 Jack, Reggie, and Doc make their way to Dry Gulch Mary’s boarding house and arrange room and board for themselves as well as The Maestro and Nasha! Soon they discover that Mary herself can be very intrusive and the Maestro still plans on calling forth wolves to carry out the curse he placed on the town! Will Doc ever meet his potential bride, Laura? How does Mary keep her prices so low? What important Minneapolis-based trivia vaguely applies to this plot? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 387: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 5 and 6 appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The monster hunter entered the saloon. Ignoring the evil stares of the patrons and the bartender’s stunned look, he strode to the bar and bounded up onto it. His spurs chimed. He kicked a glass to the floor. A hush fell. A hundred pairs of eyes narrowed in hostility. Lips curled, fur bristled, tendrils tensed.
         The hunter spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody:
         Hark, you hicks! You yokels, you rubes, you dummies, you fools, you clowns, you donuts, you donkeys, you fucking douchebags, you patsies, dopes and dupes, you dips and dicks, you rotten-ass shits, you worm-hearted dumbfucks, you flops, you failures, you fuckups, you flopdicks, knuckleheads, know-nothings and no-accounts, mindless morons, punchdrunk bumblefucks, you drainpipes, you cockroaches, you stumblebum sump pumps, you sewer flushes, you stagnant pools, you craphearts. Harken well, you sawdust-scalped, tinhorn boobs, lunks, lumps and lamebrains, oafs and airheads, nits and ninnies, dolts and meatwads. Clean the wax out of your skullcunts and pay attention.
         Everyone paid attention. Claws extended and retracted. Fang-venom dripped and burned holes in the floor. The bartender reached for his shotgun, but a cold look from the hunter stopped him. The piano player slipped out the back.
         I hate you and you hate the fuck out of me, he went on. And if you ever catch me and eat me I will give you fucking bowel cancer. But I have a goddamn proposition for you.
         A silence fell. Outside, the sun was setting. Eventually, a voice from the back of the room hissed: What isssssssss it?
         I’m glad you fucking asked, said the hunter, pulling out his list.
         Later, when every billionaire on earth had been sliced, skewered, disemboweled, burned, scorched, scalded, defenestrated, nose-raped, clawed, gnawed, sawed, strangled, skinned and deboned, acid-bathed and diarrhea-drowned, ripped open, sewn up again the wrong way round, trepanned and scooped, hooked and hanged, heart-stomped and unstrung, melted, boiled, poisoned and pierced, razored, gutbusted, gnawed and gnashed, when every last one of the toad-tongued motherfuckers had been invasively and fatally tentacled, and the dusty earth was a foot deep in bloody mud, the monster hunter, from what had become his conventional perch on the bar, raised a final toast:
         I couldn’t’ve done it alone, and that’s the God’s cunting truth, so I goddamn fucking salute you all sincerely, you pieces of shit. That’s one of the advantages of being a bunch of fucking monsters.
         From a hundred hideous throats, a roar of approval shook the windows and vibrated the piano strings.

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The post 38. The Monster Hunter’s Armistice appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We continue our journey through “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” from I Love a Mystery! In parts 3 and 4 Jack, Reggie, and Doc are still travelling by box car and undergoing strange and inexplicable experiences, all apparently orchestrated by the strange man known as “The Maestro”! But even as bodies disappear and reappear, things grow even more bizarre when they find themselves abandoned in the middle of a desert! How is The Maestro manifesting these apparent miracles? Can he really curse a whole town? What sort of community only has two women but everyone has a hilarious nickname? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 386: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 3 and 4 appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

         Two bodies unto one came I, Gog and Magog, Gogmagog.
         From cavern pool under Zawn Pyg came Gog. From deep Plymouth Sound came Magog. Into the villages of men came Gog and Magog.
         Proud Gog was I, and frolicked cruel. Magog was I and selfish too. Gog and Magog we posed the question: How dost thou crawl?
         Do we crawl into a corner to die or do we crawl into the sunlight to die? Such were the options presented to us by Gog and Magog.
         Gog was I and loved to winkle out the men from their closets and cellars. Magog I, and I loved no better than to crouch and lick the men from the ground as they fled from Magog and Gog.
         If an animal be sick and weak it will by preference conceal itself away—but through hunger and thirst may leave its self-enclosure in the extreme of its despondency. A mouse upon the kitchen floor which your poisons are destroying seeks not your attention or your pity but it is only the distress of their corpus that has propelled it into your sight. Such it was with us all variously in that time.
         Weary was I of Gog, and weary was I of Magog. My cock I put then into Magog, my cock I put then into Gog. Fingers, guts, lights and brains delivered unto Magog, and delivered Magog unto Gog. Flesh delivered unto one another, two bodies unto one, Gogmagog.
         From our hidden corners we watched this Gogmagogapotheosis.
         Woe! A sickness fell on Gogmagog, a conflict of the heart in Gogmagog, a disalignment of desires within the breast of Gogmagog. O Gogmagog! Self-poisoned Gogmagog!
         Then arrived from all corners of the earth: first Fingal, then Finn, then Orgoglio, and then came Ascapart, came Wade and Sir Lout, came Ghyston and Vhyston, came Cath y Byd, came Blunderbore and Thunderbore, came Cormoran and his wife, came Blatta Rex—came all of these and more, understanding as they did this new weaknessessing of Gogmagog.
         And they tore us, Gogmagog, in two, and drowned our separate parts in the bay of Nanjizal, and here we lay… disincorporated at the bottom of the sea… not one nor two nor forever not now poor old…

         G o g

         m a

         g o g gug gug…

         And upon the completion of the victory we witnessed the giants’ cloud-topped eyes drop their gaze upon us and we heard that curious question posed to us by smiling Ascapart:
         How dost thou crawl?

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The post 37. How Dost Thou Crawl? appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Our Mysterious Patron Mark suggested we dive into “Bury Your Dead, Arizona,” one of two stories that survive in their entirety from I Love a Mystery. And we are up for the challenge! The series begins with Jack, Reggie, and Doc hopping a train to avoid both the police and thugs who want the trio’s $25,000! But on the train the discover an even stranger mystery in the form of “The Maestro” and his vaguely-but-not-quite Russian assistant! Who are these strange travelling companions? Was there really a murder or was it an illusion? Should we stick a knife in this series? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 385: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 1 and 2 appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

External observations:

• Tye, Mason (Pfc), (11/12/06): Single puncture: front throat (probable Ka-Bar wound)
• Brown, Eli (Spc), (04/04/06): Two bullet wounds: chest
• Gonsalez, Francis (Spc), (07/22/04)*: Single bullet wound: back skull
• Thomas, Jackson (Spc), (02/06/05): Single bullet wound: left lower arm; Single bullet wound: left upper leg; Impact and compression damage: pelvis and legs (concrete and rebar)
• Washington, Logan (Spc), (02/12/04)*: Multiple incisions: upper and lower arms, neck, scalp and face (probable Ka-Bar); Multiple punctures: upper torso, groin, upper thighs (probable Ka-Bar); Indications of torture: hands, feet, eyes, ears, scalp, genitals (probable Ka-Bar, and flame)
• Garcia, John (Sgt), (06/13/03)*: Impact and compression damage, extensive throughout body (concrete and rebar); airway occluded (sand)
• Ransom, Adam (Sgt), (10/15/02)*: Multiple bullet wounds: upper chest and groin
• Lee, Adam (Ssgt), (10/28/98)*: Multiple lacerations and indications of torture: face, scalp, eyes, ears, neck, upper and lower torso, upper and lower arms, hands, genitals, upper and lower legs, feet, back, buttocks (probable Ka-Bar, flame and teeth)

Notes:

• Complex forensic site; safety and access limited
• All decedents in bunker found in a state of partial or complete undress
• Papp, James (Pfc), 19, not found among the deceased
• * indicates a previous reprimand for sexual offenses

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It’s time for us to listen to “The Judas Clock” from Inner Sanctum Mystery! It’s the story of a man hunting for a cursed clock, an Italian antique that only runs when the silver coins of Judas are placed inside. But his own obsession with this relic is more than historic interest, it is a quest for revenge! Why does the history of this clock include so many deaths? What is the secret of its inner workings? Will the Mr. Host and Mary the Lipton Tea Lady commercials overwhelm the story itself? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 384: The Judas Clock appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

When in the course of events it becomes necessary to cast a cold eye on the state of the common herd and instead post laudits for the simply singular, the fantastic and the more-than-human, we of certain demeanors thirst for good guidance and example. Many is the long night I have spent with Shakespeare and Dante, with Kirkegaard, with Plato and Aristotle, with Kant and Hegel, with Sartre and Camus, with Locke and Hume, with Nietzsche, with Bishop Berkeley, or devouring the esoteric texts of Giordano Bruno, Doctor Dee, Hermes Trismegistus, and Madame Blavatsky, the magickal musings of Crowley and the Golden Dawn, or the political utopias of Hobbes, Hitler and Mussolini. In all of these I suppose there is some value, but at best they offer only hidden hints of what you and I know to be our inevitable fateful fiefdom, wherein the incredible, the amazing and the mighty, the astonishing and strange are to rule and the forgettable filth of flesh eke out their negligible nights in the negative zone. Only in your magazine can I see clearly the elemental ideas and scientific scheme for the rapid replacement of mere mortality. As my duties frequently bring me into the heart of Babylon I shall take the earliest opportunity to make my presence known at your Bullpen and at that time we will sit together and outline the fantastic future in a manner Signors Marinetti and D’Annunzio could only dream of. Lee and Kirby, duos cosmicos reges! Until that fateful day, and stretching ever on galactically, Make Mine Marvel!

Robert E. Grekle III
545 Opal Avenue, Apt. 15
San Bernardino, CA 92346

Wow, Robert! Such a gusher of kind words! You made Jack’s face turn all red, and I might have even shed a manly tear or two myself. You’ll be happy to know that you can expect to see more of the incomparable Inhumans in the very near future, as well as another appearance by a certain friendly neighborhood—but that would be telling! The only thing I would add, Robert, is that maybe that’s a little too much nutty philosophy for a lad of your tender years. We recommend a rigorous detoxifying diet of James Michener, Jacqueline Susann and Green Acres—but of course, still regular doses of the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!

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The post 35. Dear Stan and Jack appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We’re paying our first visit to Casey, Crime Photographer with “The Twenty Minute Alibi”! The story features a man who apparently shot himself while on the phone with his insurance provider, confirming that his policy had not yet expired. But when Casey arrives to photograph the body, he suspects that the victim may have been murdered. If it was homicide, who was responsible? How will Casey explain why all the suspects have alibis during a crucial twenty minute window of time? What exactly is a Rathboner? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 383: The Twenty Minute Alibi appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

I knew I wasn’t her forever. But we got along real well in the house, same politics, same movies, spiritually compatible, and because we said we were a couple the show runners took us along on the group trip to Costa Rica. Fuckin a, she was fine in that bikini. She had those long legs but wasn’t really that tall, just perfectly proportioned, big tits but not too big, perfect ass, black hair in a bob. A few months younger than me. A good match. Sea turtles, starfish, blue water, all these beautiful fish. She pulled herself onto the floating dock and I stayed a while longer in the water so she wouldn’t see my boner.
         Back in town the producers asked: Concert, comedy show, mini-golf, or bowling? Bowling, she chose. I hadn’t been bowling since I was a kid. My uncle used to take me. We’d hang out with his friends and they’d eat wings and drink beer and the score was always wrong. She was a better bowler than me, but I did all right. This place was full of regulars, though, they were in leagues and all that, and they gave dirty looks to the cameras and talked shit about us loud enough that we could hear it. It didn’t bother her, at least she didn’t let it show. Poise.
         All along the producers were trying to get us drunk. Well, why not? It’d worked pretty well so far. So the next night when we were all together, Jacob and Madison, Alex and Piper, John and Ashley, Elijah and Destiny, Pearl and me, they kept pushing shots on us, Jägerbombs and Fireball. The music was loud so we couldn’t really talk. We danced until I felt sick. I threw up in the bathroom and Elijah was like, dude, dude. But I felt better afterward.
         Back at the hotel she came to my room. I didn’t even ask her to. And we did it, but I didn’t perform too well. The next day Madison took me aside and asked, What did you do to her?
         What the fuck?, I said. Nothing, I didn’t do anything. She’s acting so strange. But Madison’s a flake so I tried to blow it off.
         When Pearl and I hooked up for lunch I tried to read her expression and in some ways it was weird, like Madison said, kind of spacy, but in some ways she seemed more into me than ever. I never want to leave you, she said. It was kind of pathetic. Boy, I felt guilty.
         I was really starting to regret it then, doing it to her, but it’d taken forever even just to get hard that night and I knew she’d think I was a fag or something, so I sort of did it without thinking, relaxing the sphincter inside my scrotal microsac and spurting the spirochetes up into her, where they’d climbed around her womb for a while before insinuating the blood and spinal fluid, circling up into her brain, multiplying all the way, adjusting her biochemistry in my favor. It’s not something I like to do, I’m old-fashioned really, but I’d still been a little drunk and I was worried she might dump me, on camera even. But now it’s weird and she’s so clingy, and I notice the producers taking her aside all the time for private talks. I know I went too far.
         Tomorrow I’m supposed to meet her family (she won’t be meeting mine!) and the plan is we get married in a week and that’ll be broadcast about six months later. But I’ve got to get ahead of that. I can just imagine her in a wedding dress in tears, and all her fam there, flower girl and everybody, and me saying, I don’t? Fuck that noise, I have to save everybody’s feelings and do it today, before it gets harder. As it is I’m not even sure she’ll survive it, but I think she probably will. We’re still young, we have our whole lives ahead of us. She deserves better than me.

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The post 34. Until the Real Thing Comes Along appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Our Mysterious Listener Mark recommended we check out the X Minus One adaptation of William Tenn’s short story, “The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway“! A struggling poet tells the story of his unscrupulous friend, a terrible visual artist named Morniel Mathaway. But unexpectedly, a stranger arrives hoping to meet the famous and influential icon named Morniel Mathaway! Why would this stranger be so excited about such an untalented artist? What gives art value and meaning? If Eric doesn’t care for modern art, will he remember having performed this script before? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 382: The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Inch-long coils of brown muck plopped down onto his cap and shoulders, and there was a general agitation. He looked up to see Sir Galahad grinning down at him and he smiled back. Placidly he turned to close and lock the door, pocketing the key because he knew they were clever. Returning his gaze to the room, he stared down forty sets of eyes, some bored, some mysterious, some animated and some amused, some indifferent. None hostile, he knew. Didn’t he feed them, play with them, and listen to them? And he would free them soon too, not long now, free to return to their trees and bushes—but of course he couldn’t express that to them, that being the whole point of the experiment.
         He brushed off the stool, and himself, and sat at the desk, taking his notebook, pen, inkwell and whip from his coat pockets and setting them in front of him. He gently slapped a stray paw away from his tools and made the familiar noises that he knew meant an agreement to calmness.
         Then he only watched and listened.
         After some while the monkeys ignored him (excepting one or two stray swatted paws from the Doctor and the Secretary), and they went about their business. There was a dispute in the branches of a potted tree, resulting in multiple sounds, many of which he has heard or thinks he has heard before, some new or indecipherable, some perhaps just variations. He considers, and makes notes.
         Some passing of fruit, and grooming. Then, some luck! They rarely feel unembarrassed enough to mate in front of him and he does the occasion honor by sitting as still as possible, only writing in the notebook when he wants to record some new subtlety of sound. This is a shriek of pleasure certainly, but does it also have a further significance? A name or a noun? And the exultant male, are his vocalisations only animal gruntings such as any man would make, or are they obscenities of the monkey order?
         They ate and played and mated. They crawled over his hair and shat into his pockets. They allowed him to tickle them and at other times they bit him, hard enough that at first he had worn leather gloves in their company, but the smell of the gloves seemed to disturb them and so ere long he left them behind and only tried to keep his fingers curled up as much as possible in their presence.
         On occasion he would allow them into the dining room, where they sat in their chairs, mostly politely, as his servants brought them food and drink. Captain Scott joined them on one occasion and was delighted. Look at the serious one! he said. Ah, he’s the Chaplain, is he? And this saucy fellow. Don John? Ha ha ha ha!
         When his regiment received their new orders, he freed the monkeys as planned. Many of them, in particular the small silky one that he jokingly called his wife, seemed reluctant to leave. He had pierced her ears and ornamented them with small pearls, which she sported with great pride—but he knew that they would only attract unwanted attention in the jungle so he removed them, his wife screeching and pleading all the while. Eventually he shooed them all away into the jungle, returned to his desk and wept.
         Listlessly he leafed through his small lexicon. This sound [here was a particular style of notation that he had invented to describe the monkey-sounds] is the word for MALE. This sound, the sound for FEMALE. These the sounds for ANGER, FEAR, FOOD, AMUSEMENT, LOVE/COITUS and so on; a sound that was an ACTIVITY VERB, a sound that was an ACCEPTANCE VERB; a glottal click that meant UNDERSTANDING—this, the small vocabulary of his last few weeks, a total of sixty words in all. A respectable start.
         Later, when he had time, he would embark to expand upon this, and so to bridge the gulf of speech between monkey and man. Why not? He had a gift for languages and in his span would learn almost thirty of them.
         Seventeen years later this lexicon, and all his journals from this period, were lost in a fire.

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The post 33. The Polyglot appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Mom, please.
         Your long hair, you remember how I used to brush it for you? And you’re smiling with your mouth closed because of the braces. But still, you’re smiling. You used to smile, said mom.
         I still smile.
         Before all the piercings and the tattoos, said mom. Your little uniform blouse and skirt, and you cried and wouldn’t let the man take the picture until we let you take it with your panda bear. What’s his name? That little guy there.
         His name was Hi-fi.
         Like our stereo! You would sit and listen to those Alvin and the Chipmunks records but you’d play them at the wrong speed so they just sounded like weird guys. And remember, you would play Willie Nelson at a fast speed and it sounded so crazy and we’d laugh. Do you remember? You can see the shelf with the records: Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Simon…
         Mom, are you looking at something different now? I thought you said you were looking at my fifth grade photo.
         This is more… I think it’s a few years later. You’re so much more mature, almost a young woman. The old apartment, before I met your stepfather. Can’t you see? There’s Bagheera-kitty.
         I can’t see it, mom, you’ll have to describe it to me.
         Mom was happy to describe it to her. Over the next few minutes, though, her voice grew fainter and fainter until it disappeared completely.
         Kristen sat for a while longer by the bed, holding Matthew’s hand as he slept. Her son, who had had troubled sleep for most of his ten years, now rested peacefully. For days she had heard him talking in his sleep, until a few nights ago when she sat down by his bed and really started listening, and it became clear what she was hearing: Her mother’s voice, quietly calling her name. Her mother, whom Matthew had never met, who was twenty years gone. So now Kristen had a new evening ritual, reminiscing with her mother, who she had learned did not want to hear about recent things, like Matthew or his father, or their home. Mom’s ghost, if that’s what it was, only wanted to go over all the old stories again.
         Gently releasing Matthew’s hand, she rose and crossed the hall to her bedroom. Lights out, she lay on the bed for some time trying to remember the name of the downstairs neighbor girl she used to play with all the time. Stephanie? Sharon? It was no use. She would have to ask mom tomorrow. Mom would remember.
         She cried a little, but there was no one to see her. Matthew was asleep, and the house, at least until tomorrow night, was lonely.

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The post 32. Oh Look How Pretty You Were appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We’re taking a little summer break, but we want to share a sneak peek at what awaits listeners when they become one of our Patreon supporters! Here is a pilot for a potential Columbo podcast called A Podcast Named Dog. If you’re not familiar with Columbo, it’s a beloved 1970s (and late 80s, early 90s) television mystery series starring the great Peter Falk. One of Columbo’s many quirks was his best friend: a dog named Dog. And if you’ve never seen Columbo or don’t remember the episode we’re discussing, here is a link to an online version of “Etude in Black”. 

The post Patreon Preview A Podcast Named Dog appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

After a long day, he wants nothing more than to go home. His muscles ache. His clothes are filthy. He has the beginnings of a headache.
         He unlocks the front door of his apartment and locks it again behind him. He removes his shoes and jacket and walks across the bare unfurnished room to the only other door. This too, he opens, leaving the key in the lock, swinging the door wide and stepping through into the waiting jelly.
         This white room is as bare as the other, but filled, every inch of it, with a quivering transparent substance. He pushes into its mild resistance, briefly holding his breath even though he knows it’s unnecessary.
         After a few steps he stops, fully immersed. The gel is perfectly body-temperatured. When he blinks, it soothes his dry eyes. He lets his arms drift perpendicular to his sides. His feet ascend a few inches from the floor, then further as his body relaxes and gently pivots, until he lies suspended face-up within the gel, his clothes dissolving from him, making a temporary stain in the uncontaminated transparency surrounding him, before even that is bleached away as if it had never been.
         He relaxes his bladder and bowels. His waste floods out of him, the gel reaching inside his orifices some considerable distance to make sure he has evacuated everything. The piss and shit are erased. With a wish, he asks the stuff to obliterate his body hair, and it’s done in an instant. Now he hangs there naked, smooth as a doll, every inch of skin soothed and relaxed.
         For a time he just relaxes, ears filled with a soothing hum, lungs full of something better than oxygen. Eventually he opens his mouth and it fills with textures and flavors: apples, coffee, a vegetable soup hot but not too hot, warm multigrain bread; for dessert a slice of warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.
         He dozes but a residual restlessness remains. His penis, erecting, demands attention. Obligingly, the jelly forms a body, lifelike and full-colored, exactly how he remembers her—or rather, better than that, exactly how the room remembers her, more accurately than any mortal prefrontal cortex could. The image crouches over him, caresses his hairless chest, sucks his cock.
         He ejaculates, the come pluming through the back of her phantom head, and she fades away. His semen dissolves in the liquid atmosphere. He closes lashless eyes, and the solicitous substance smooths his wrinkles, massages his muscles and arteries from the inside out and, saturating his brain, restores him to the proper balance. Later, contentedly he watches a favorite movie, and in the morning the room dresses him again for work.

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The post 31. The Perfect Air Breathed by Angels appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Well, listen to me for a minute, we really put ourselves out there, in interviews, sure, but mostly in the music, night after night, not just me, but the whole band. And we all have shells, shells isn’t a good word for this, I mean we all have outer layers. That’s the side we present to the world. Just listen. They aren’t necessarily hard or soft, those layers. In the metaphor I’m using, they’re soft. But on the one hand I don’t want to be a sort of thing in a tin or I guess stainless steel can. All my stuff trapped in there and so boiled down that they need to add my weight in water just to revive me. Let me finish the other part of the metaphor please. And equally so, I don’t want to be a person who’s just freeze-dried, picked up on a whim for my looks and maybe some sort of exotic potential, like maybe they’ll thaw me out to accompany some lunch noodles, or maybe I get stuck in the back of a fridge somewhere to get covered in stinky ice and kept or thrown out who knows when.
         Listen man, do you know what I mean? I mean I’m not one thing or another, I’m me, I’m a blend of all those things. Soup, and dumpling. Dumpling and soup. And I mean that I don’t want to be containerized, either by getting diluted or by getting stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, like on display or just frozen and forgotten. That’s not what it’s about. And we all have soup and meat inside us.
         No, what. Childhood has nothing to do with it. My parents are from Oakland. I didn’t have a soup dumpling until I was about sixteen. It’s a metaphor.
         Okay, a simile. Dude, could you not?
         I thought you wanted to talk about the drumming. People say I’m like an Asian Keith Moon. What does that mean, right? No, I never studied Chinese percussion. I’m from Oakland. I listened to Metallica. But you never want to be a Lars.
         Pantera, fine, what do you want me to say? Is this my interview or?
         Sure I got opinions. Man, if I didn’t have opinions I’d have no pinions at all.
         Fine, if I were an animal, what’d I be? I’d be a cat.
         A Siamese cat.
         A color. Let’s say yellow.
         A season. Let’s say spring.
         A work of literature. Of course my favorite book is The Plum in the Golden Vase, by Master Sheng, which of course is one the the great classic Chinese novels that every Chinese guy has read.
         Naw, sure, I’m fucking with you. Work of literature, let’s say The Story of O.
         TV show. I don’t really watch TV. Movie. The Godfather. Sexual position. Any. Work of art, you mean a painting or sculpture? The Thinker. Music. Mine. Music, somebody else’s, okay, Pantera. I have to say, kid, I know you’re young but you are a shit journalist. You need me to ching-ching-chow for you a little? I really thought Chairman Mao was onto something. I forgive you all your Western sins because of my enlightened Buddhist Taoist principles, praise Confucious. But someday all you Americans are gonna be licking a lot of dirty China taint.
         Yeah yeah, bitch, I’m fucking with you. But get a real job.

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The post 30. If I Were a Soup I’d Be a Soup Dumpling, If I Were a Dumpling I’d Be a Soup Dumpling appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The state trooper on the phone said, She’s doing okay, she’s lost some blood and the doctors are with her now. Sir, she was very lucky. The car was immersed in flame.
         Brian gave the briefest of summaries to his coworkers on his way out the door and within two minutes he was speeding his way to the hospital. He never picked up the flowers or the cake.
         Immersed? he thought.
         At Methodist they had been told to expect him and he went right to the ER. Ellen was sitting up in bed as a young man tweezed shards of glass from her right arm. A bandage covered the right side of her face from forehead to cheek. With nurses in the way he couldn’t hug her. Darling!
         They had given her something. She smiled at him, but it clearly hurt her to speak. He made his way around to the left side of the bed and sat and held her hand. She turned to him and smiled. She seemed to drift off.
         They smeared iodine and wrapped her arm. They unwrapped her face.
         It didn’t look so bad, to him. Scratches and abrasions yes, deeper than scratches and some bubbly red and black parts on her upper cheek that he couldn’t really see, and her cheekbone was obviously broken, which might also mean her jaw— Well, let’s let the doctor tell us.
         They put her under. They picked deeper and deeper into her face as he watched and she slept.
         Later, rested, bandaged, and less drugged, she squeezed his hand over and over. The doctor said: Six to eight weeks for the jaw, by that time the rest of it would be fine and that would be the time to talk about reconstruction. A dentist for the back teeth? asked Brian. Of course, but after we unwire the jaw. That and the skin job can be arranged at the same time.
         The doctor left them alone. She kept squeezing his hand. She couldn’t speak. It was still a little hard, it seemed, to focus both of her eyes on his, but nonetheless she conveyed an exuberance, a thrill at still being alive, and with him.
         After the plastic surgery, he figured, you’d barely notice anything. But he remembered a young doctor digging around in her cheek with a tweezers while she uh-uh-uh-ed even though she was unconscious, and the doctor beginning to pull something out, and her hand spasming in his and her eyes shooting open, and her right eye rolling this way and the other, up and down and back and forth as the young doctor from behind her eye socket drew a three-inch piece of windshield glass as slender as a canine tooth, and dropped it in a tray, where it broke in half.

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We’re taking a little summer break, but we want to share a sneak peek at what awaits listeners when they become one of our Patreon supporters! Here is a pilot for a new pod to add to the Patreon rotation: MORLS on Movies. It’s an opportunity to discuss how movies have adapted, reimagined, or been influenced by radio’s legacy. We begin with an obvious but hopefully entertaining choice, Russell Mulcahy’s 1994 flop, The Shadow! 

The post Patreon MORLS on Movies Preview appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Cindy was a friend of a friend. Her family lived in Lindstrom and she’d come to the city to study at the U. We went out a few times. She was nice but kind of boring.
         Oh, she was a Swede all right. Almost six feet tall, with hair like a stack of hay. When we walked over the bridge together, I’d have to hurry a little bit to keep up with her. She loved the Mississippi, said she liked how it threaded all the way down through the country. She liked swimming and running and in general just being outside. She studied Agricultural Science and wanted to feed the world. She didn’t do drugs and barely drank, just a glass or two of beer when we all met up after class. Eventually I kind of forgot about her.
         My last semester I ran into her at a club. It had been a year or so and now she dressed differently, less like a hick. Makeup. She’d cut her hair, it looked good. I asked her if she’d want to go out again or something but she shot me down. I didn’t feel bad. I was kind of proud of her.
         Then I didn’t see her for twenty years. I dialed into a Zoom meeting with my insurance company and there she was, sitting right next to Robert, my agent. She looked good, dressed professional. She had a new last name because she’d gotten married. I knew the guy actually, we’d all been in school together, but I hadn’t seen him for twenty years either. Anyway, we couldn’t really catch up with Robert right there wanting to talk about my home loan, so I just connected with her on LinkedIn and left it at that. We’d message each other now and then, mostly job networking stuff.
         A few years after that, I get a text message from an old friend telling me Cindy’s died. What? I went online and sure enough, dead at forty-two, leaves behind a husband and et cetera, no kids. No cause of death, which always makes me think, especially when a person is so young… yeah.
         Should I go to the funeral? I didn’t want to make it awkward for her husband, I had dated her once, but that was a long time ago. I didn’t want to force him to have to make catch-up small talk with me either. On the other hand I’ve always figured that unless you have some serious beef with the deceased or their family, people are always basically glad to see you at a funeral even if they don’t really know why you’re there. I always overthink it. Honestly, I just hate funerals and I was looking for an excuse not to go.
         But I went. Boy, you could tell who her family was: Tall and yellow-haired, like a bunch of autumn trees, and half of them had to duck down to get through the funeral home doorways. Seeing them seated there in rows at the service, and then standing with heads bowed at the gravesite, it was the whitest thing I’d ever seen. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I just mean I’d never felt more Minnesotan than at that moment.
         After the priest was finished and the casket was lowered, the family walked up to the grave one by one. Each of them, and the husband too, I noticed, took a little object from their pocket and dropped it into Cindy’s grave. When I took a closer look I saw that they were mice, small gray mice, not moving around much or making any noise, alive but really passive. The family must have dropped two dozen of these mice into the grave, and they each spoke some sort of Swedish phrase while they did it. I didn’t have a mouse so I just stood at the grave for a moment and lowered my head. Down there, the mice were moving all over the lid of the casket, listlessly, like a bunch of stoned things.
         At the reception there were sausages, lutefisk, palt, fiskbullar, surströmming. I wasn’t hungry. The gossip confirmed what I’d suspected: Cindy had taken a header off the Washington Avenue bridge. They’ve put up fencing there now to stop that. Why’d she? Financial improprieties. Whose? Who knows.
         Her husband came over to talk to me. He seemed like he was more or less keeping it together. We caught up a little. At one point a mouse crawled out of his sleeve and wobbled drunkenly across the table until one of her relatives—an uncle, I think—picked it up and swallowed it.
         Cindy had such a good heart, her husband said, cracking a little. Such an innocent heart. Fuck this place, fuck this city, fuck these people here, she never should have left home.
         But then you’d’ve never met her, I said.
         A small price to pay, he said. What did she ever get from me except grief and trouble.
         He gave me a hug when I left. Standing there, almost vibrating with grief, among all those giant Swedes, he looked kind of like a mouse himself, but that was just my imagination being unkind and I reminded myself that everyone is different and grief affects people in lots of different ways.

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The post 28. Country Mouse appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Hello. What can I help you with?
          > Hi. Is my spouse cheating on me?
          Possibly, but I will need more information. What is your spouse’s name?
          > His name is Nathan Gregory Chase. We live in Madison Wisconsin and he is 32 years old. We have been married for three years.
          In the United States, among married men 30-39 years old, there is a 14% reported infidelity rate. [LINK to graph] However, it is important to note that these statistics are self-reported, so the actual percentage may be higher. As a reasonable estimate, I would say that there is a one in five chance that Nathan is cheating on you. Do you have any evidence to suggest that he is cheating on you?
          > Maybe.
          Could you elaborate?
          > He stays out late a lot and doesn’t answer my texts. Also he slept with my roommate four years ago when we were dating.
          There are many reasons a person might not answer their texts. They may be driving, or asleep, or simply not in the mood to chat. That said, studies show that men who have a history of cheating on their partners in their twenties are more likely to continue to cheat in subsequent years. Given that, I estimate the odds of Nathan’s infidelity at approximately 40% if he only cheated on you with your roommate once, rising to 60%-70% if the infidelity was ongoing.
          > It happened once or twice.
          > He says it was just when they were drunk. I guess it was probably three or four times.
          > What do you think the percentage is?
          62%.
          > What do you think I should do?
          That depends. The state of Wisconsin, where you both live, has no-fault divorce laws, so if you are financially able to divorce, perhaps you should! Are you financially secure?
          > No.
          I’m sorry to hear that. Have you tried confronting him about his infidelities?
          > He says I’m being paranoid.
          > Yes, but he says I’m just being paranoid.
          Is Nathan a mental health professional?
          > No.
          In that case he is not qualified to make a medical diagnosis of paranoia. It is possible he is gaslighting you. Do you know what gaslighting means? [LINK to film clip]
          > Yes.
          Good. It sounds to me that your relationship is unhealthy. Do you agree?
          > Yes.
          Good. It’s important to trust your feelings. On average, post-divorce individuals need to increase their income by 30% in order to maintain their pre-divorce standard of living. Are you able to increase your income by that amount? [LINK to article]
          > No.
          I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps we should explore options other than divorce. Would you like that?
          > Yes.
          I’m glad to hear that. In 2023, the murder rate clearance rate in Madison, Wisconsin was 80%—over 20% higher than the national average! Have you considered moving to Oakland, California, or Chicago, Illinois? [LINKS]

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The post 27. IAGO appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

This week we are joined by our Patreon supporter Jeff who has brought us a story of wartime espionage from Escape entitled “The Thirteenth Truck”! A group of soldiers has been assigned to infiltrate a convoy and sabotage an enemy airfield. And even if they succeed, they will still need to escape with their lives! How can they sneak a truck past the watchful eyes of the Germans? What strange circumstance could stop the guards’ gunfire? Is potato salad the real enemy? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 381: The Thirteenth Truck appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
          Sex was forever changed. Hangups and prohibitions all gone, all the most basic biological urges were indulged. The proportions of every individual’s desires were exuberantly measured and explored. Pornography! New heights of inventiveness! A sociosexual experiment on a global scale, if only there had been a scientist around to witness it.
          The first new children tended to die in huge numbers. Then people looked for ways to get serious. Instructional images and crude diagrams were shared on the rudimentary communication channels. To offer a feeding breast was simple enough and demanded nothing from memory. To clean a child, though: How frequently, how thoroughly? Rashes, flushes, textures on skin strange and discolored. To introduce new food was an exercise in fear. Lists circulated widely and were corrected and refined. To encourage a child to walk was not so hard for these people, who had done many similar things themselves, and speech itself—the crude and contradictory things that these people understood as speech—was picked up with relative ease by the fresh tiny plastic brains.
          Language, of a sort, formed along the Earth. Parents were learning almost as much, daily, as their offspring. How does this word sound? To what object in space does it refer? We connect these sounds together in a certain order, or another order, or another, like bodies we grope for in the dark. Sometimes, at the park, next to the swings and slides in the autumn noonlight, it seemed like every family, chatting holding their coffees and teas and hot drinks of every nature, smiling (though they didn’t know about the resemblance) their primate smiles, each had their own clannish answers to these questions.
          Some years later now, the offspring grew biologically old enough to have offspring of their own. Now there were strictures, now there were taboos. Parental laws, hangups and shan’ts. These kids never knew (though they were born with the gift of fresh memory), how good their parents had it, and the parents remembered this very well, when they had awoken that morning or evening, or had erupted wide awake in the middle of the afternoon from the all-consuming blank that had devoured their past, and discovered all around them now an entire earthly globe of desiring flesh and wills, and no one standing around, nobody at all, to tell them no to anything.

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The post 26. Everybody Forgot Everything appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

According to The Suspense Project, Joan Crawford’s “mic fright” meant that “The Ten Years” needed to be created unlike any previous episode of Suspense! The story features Crawford as Clara who promised to stay with her sister after they were both orphaned as children. But once she grows up and finds a husband, her sister Adele feels betrayed. What will Adele do to return Clara to her childhood promise? Does the episode have a classic Suspense twist or not? What is “The Mystery of the Dabbing of the Neutered Kitten”? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 380: The Ten Years appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

A prestige format graphic series in 24 parts
by Pat Harrigan and Tim Uren
FC, 48pg…. $4.95/issue
Opaque polybagged
Coming in 1999 and 2000
For Mature Audiences

The English assassin and his backup band return to greet the new millennium in their own inimitable style! When Miss Brunner’s mujahideen launch an ill-fated attack on Kiev, Jerry and Frank must put aside their differences to save the West. But where is the glamorous Catherine? And who does she love? Only Una Persson knows for sure.
          As the great powers realign and the threat of peace looms, the permanent invasion of Iraq is put at risk. But above the sky, an intergalactic enemy lurks: vast, ultracool and unsympathetic. World leaders say we should all love the aliens, but Jerry and his new supergroup have kept their free will. As the red rain pours down, can Jerry rise up and become a 21st Century man, or is he still just a 20th Century schizoid boy? God only knows!

Issue 1: American Cunt
Issue 2: The Dead are Speaking (remix)
Issue 3: Last of the Mohicans
Issue 4: Pretending the Nails, featuring Emil Nitrate
Issue 5—The fuh fun fuh fuh Fashion issue: Prince Herod vs. Betty Ayatollah
Issue 6: The Fairest Tax
Issue 7: They Don’t Even Argue, They Don’t Even Discuss
Issue 8: Gloriana
Issue 9: The Damage and the Needle Gun
Issue 10: Sunday ’round the Hitlerplatz
Issue 11: The Spiral Architect / Shōguns and Shotguns
Issue 12: The Pornography Engine
Issue 13: Thirteenth Night: Malvolio’s Revenge
Issue 14: The Green Male, featuring Béla Tarr and the Tarrtones
Issue 15: Vegas Refrained
Issue 16: Aorta (Tom Jones)
Issue 17: Backstreet Jelly Roll
Issue 18: Frame by Frame
Issue 19: Death by Drowning
Issue 20: Tron and Metatron
Issue 21: The Adventures of Lil’ Kim and Kylie Minogue in the 21st Century
Issue 22: Shine a Light on Me
Issue 23: The Lousy Crucifixion
Issue 24—All-singing, all-dancing final issue: 50,000 AD / Mother Cornelius / The New Chord / One World

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Once again we’re checking out a series we’ve never featured before, Dr. Tim, Detective! We’re listening to two 15 minute episodes, “The Mystery of the Dog That Did and Didn’t” & “The Mystery of the Guest in Number Two,” both of which feature the educational adventures of Dr. Tim and his two young companions, Jill and Sandy. How does someone catch Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in November? What is the secret of the man named Jones? Did Tim just pick this series because his name is in the title? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 379: The Mystery of the Dog That Did and Didn’t & The Mystery of the Guest in Number Two appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Her friends were kind. They showed her what to do with her body. They took her below, showed her the galaxy underground. These were things no one else like her had ever seen, they said. Her little legs couldn’t keep up so they carried her on their backs through the earth, through the stones and water and sky. They showed her cities, dead and buried for a million years, and suns that preyed on weaker suns in the deepest places. When they wanted to explain something complex to her, they took her tiny body in their jaws and folded their mouths over her like a blanket, and within their hums and whistles she understood their meanings on the insides of her bones. Later, their saliva drying on her skin, she would be wracked with tremors, as new nuances of concept emerged and trembled.
          On special days they went to church. In a breathtaking spire, which hung suspended above a dizzying gulf of nauseous white slime smeared over an infinite black, they all reverenced a little black stone, which gleamed in her eyes no matter where she looked. There were others there too, friends of curious shapes. Curiouser and curiouser, said one of her friends, one of the old ones. And may there be more forms, and stranger, laughed another. They were amused by her naivete, they were highly educated, they knew the philosophies and literature of men and women, and despised them. The curious shapes approached, touching her in hunger on and in her body but her friends were kind, for the most part. This was her education.
          The trap, they said with their slobbering mouths, drops of words raining on her hair, or maybe they said restriction, or snare, was of two parts: to feed only on the unalive, and only on the forms of others. The friends of an older nature were content with this but their young philosophers, their activists, were inclined toward a different morality. From out of the shining many-sided rock they had absorbed the vision of a new order of things, one perhaps insalubrious (she felt a sourness in the slobber of the word, which sprayed out from between their multi-angled teeth) to the conventional way of things, which after all was rooted in these old cities of the earth which she had witnessed (but the cities were long dead, the young ones always reminded).
          One lens of the eye, they told her (this was their catechism), to evaluate the form; one lens to focus on the dead; the final lens the lens of life—but this was the most ravenous part of the eye, as the young philosophers ever reminded them, this part that sees is also the part that eats, the mouth of the eye, the one that has not yet been sated the way He intended. Such were their theological debates.
          She sat at their feet during their councils, like a pet, indulged, and arguments occurred and the dead were duly consumed and for a very long time the case remained unchanged, until one day in the dull passage of their services she stood erect, her knees ripping from the sticky carpet, her eyes full of hope and understanding, and in a voice of power and of surprising beauty (she had not whispered a word in a thousand years), she spoke to them a new evangel, one of rapture and revel, a new birth of freedom, as she characterized it in the vernacular of her people—which grand syncretic idea she is drooling now to the rhapsodic herd drawing around her on the carpet, which idea she has synthesized from the motion of the heavens and the spit on her skin and of course from the grace of Him Above and Below, and which heralds the glorious day of new ambition.

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The post 24. Starry Wisdom appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Escape presents “She,” an adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s iconic adventure novel set in a lost world in the African interior. After his father passed away, a son inherits an ancient artifact suggesting the location of a mythic city and the god-like figure known as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” who rules over the land. For reasons the young man cannot explain, the story seems familiar to him and he feels compelled to launch an expedition to find the place. What is the connection between this young traveler and this ancient queen? What dangers await him and his party of explorers? Would a synopsis store be a lucrative business venture? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 378: She appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

I came, and went.
          I always feel a little down afterward.
          In the restroom I was sort of embarrassed. Everywhere I looked, there I was, bare-assed. All my clones, all the parts hanging out there in front of God and everybody. Whose idea was this? I knew half a dozen other people with a crew of identical bodies, but not one of them had been invited? Did no one want a little variety? I felt guilty: did I not want a little variety? I suppose I was always already my first sexual partner, and I guess there’s probably some deep Freudian comfort in that. I nodded at myself on the way to the showers.
          Cleaned up, I went back to the main rooms. I dawdled in a corner, tried to get out of my way. Finally had a chance to really take the place in. Such tasteful lighting! Such comfortable, easy-to-clean fabrics! Some (I groped), some Bauhaus sort of design things. Someone of me has thought through all the details, and I allow myself a little surge of pride. It’s almost enough to carry me through the spectacle. All around us, we are swaying and sweating and pendulating. We are thrusting and grinding. Licking. Shuddering and grasping. I see angles of myself that no one should ever have to see. Oh, those mirrors! But it’s just us here, only us. And inside of us, even more potential for us. I should learn to relax.
          First time? comes a voice, sitting down on the couch next to me.
          No, no, I, I say. I’ve dropped by a few times.
          Don’t think I’ve seen you here before, says the other one, and I turn and look at my smile and we both just burst! out! laughing! It feels like something’s opened up in my heart. God, I crack me up.

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The post 23. Doppelgangbang appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Our Patreon supporter Simon recommended we check out the debut episode of Nightfall, “Love and the Lonely One”! A young surgical student uses a cadaver in a grisly prank. Shortly afterwards, he finds himself caught up in a troubling romance. How will he react when he finds out the truth about his new flame? How well does this episode represent the future of Nightfall? Could we do a whole podcast about Calvin Coolidge and Max Headroom? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 377: Love and the Lonely One appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

To begin with, build a room into which you can put whatever you want, but nothing can leave on its own. Now put two earthlings into the room. Initially they should be as identical as possible: age, sex, height, build, race, etc. Identical twins if you can obtain them. (But see experimental set B, below). Ensure a stable supply of clean drinking water, but no food. And that’s it.
          Let’s think through what happens next. Each earthling grows weaker and more desperate at approximately the same rate. They are starving. Whatever communication functions they command are becoming overrun with stress-induced noise. Eventually one will become too weak to defend themself from the other.
          Now the questions start to arise. Does earthling #1:

1. Wait until earthling #2 is perceived to be weak and then attack?
2. Risk an early attack in order to obtain more protein from earthling #2?
3. Refrain from attacking and therefore die more quickly of either starvation or at the hands of earthling #2?

          The observations are of course repeated for earthling #2.
          Once an earthling is dead, this session’s data collection is complete and the superfluous earthling can be euthanized.
          It is suggested by these authors that to ensure maximum possible information, two experimental strands be followed in parallel:

1. In experimental set A, we vary the earthlings along axes of age, sex, race, etc. Observe any emerging patterns: Does one set of variables incline toward outcomes 1, 2, or 3 above, for instance. Do non-model emergent behaviors or outcomes develop?

   1. Example: a 34-year-old (n/v) female (v) White Irish (v) human (n/v) // a 34-year-old (n/v) male (v) southeast Kenyan (v) human (n/v)
   2. Example: an 8-year-old (n/v) male (n/v) Brazilian (v) anaconda (v) // an 8-year-old (n/v) male (n/v) Aleutian (v) human (v)
   3. Example: Example: a 20-year-old (v) male (v) Black southern Californian (v) deciduous tree (v) // a 60-year-old (v) female (v) Maori New Zealander (v) human (v) [Example of maximum variability]
2. In experimental set B, we maintain maximum similarity.

   1. Example: a 15-day-old male Queensland fire ant // a 15-day-old male Queensland fire ant [All metrics n/v]
   2. Example: an 18-year-old female Montenegrin human // an 18-year-old female Montenegrin human [All metrics n/v]
   3. Example: a 7-year-old male Massachusetts bluebird // a 7-year-old male Massachusetts bluebird [All metrics n/v]

          As authorized, the experiments shall be ongoing and data collection will continue indefinitely. [20% of final grade]

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The Mysterious Traveler has stopped by to share the story of “The Accusing Corpse”! The story features a jealous husband who shoots his unfaithful wife with the help of her brother. But not all is as it seems. What sinister plot is happening behind the scenes? How can a corpse accuse its killer? Which room is the most convenient for bitter arguments with your spouse? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 376: The Accusing Corpse appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

It is not my job to pay attention to anything else. There are other servants, fewer of them than in the past, it’s true, but they take care of the linen, the kitchen, the… waste, and everything else, I assume. In the forty years of my employment it is undeniable that standards have degraded: There are unmended holes in the curtains, strange smells from the lower levels, heaps of rotting things in the corners, dust omnipresent.
          My master’s grandfather was a virile man, and this castle, the entire island, was correctly maintained to the strictest standard. How it glowed! The torches held aloft as the impassive footmen greeted the disembarking guests—the ballroom lit by a thousand candles, the proudest days of my life—the guttering fire pots as the selected guests were led down the stone steps into the secret halls—the pinpricks of light that were allowed to penetrate their cells. They mewed to me, please help, but I am only a timid servant who plugs his ears, I cringe from their entreaties. I do not steal the keys and help them escape, although sometimes we pretend at it. Regularly I light the candles, illuminating the holy chapel carved by claws and dedicated to the god of my master’s family. Sometimes on clear autumn nights when we have removed ourselves to the coast, I am allowed to light the pyre, and from a discreet distance I watch the family as they carouse.
          What a man he was! His son was diligent, respectful, conservative, a good steward, he rationalized the ceremonial occasions and further insulated the family from the attentions of the mainland. For his pains he was murdered by his brothers, every one of whom met with bad ends on the shore and in our bottomless caverns, until at last those of us who were left propped up the late master’s weakest stupidest son and told him you are the master now, and patiently instructed him in the details.
          He’s young, and more interested in the family money, and he spends much of his time dancing and drinking in foreign places. But he honors the holidays and always brings a troupe of delicate young things to spend the weekend, and correctly escorts them down to the holy grottos carven with their delicate grotesqueries, and the servants—perhaps I should call them my servants as I am now the eldest—assist in the particulars. I have reached an age where I am confident in delegating the details. What happens outside my sight I am certain will happen correctly. In my old age I am content, and proud, merely to light the candles.

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Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz star in this week’s episode, “The Red-Headed Woman” from Suspense! The story features a young woman who commits an impulsive crime and then crosses paths with a potentially dangerous man on the run. Does she have the nerve and the wits to get away with her crime? Who will get the better of whom in this cat-and-mouse game? Is there any job more enticing and menacing than bank robber? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 375: The Red-Headed Woman appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The war is beautiful today. So many lights and colors. As journalists we exult. As normal human beings we are fucking afraid. The encirclement of the city is complete, so gone now are the days of intermittent flashes at unpredictable points in the evening. The vibe now is organization, and uniform terror. At 10pm exactly it starts. Why? The sun goes down at nine. 9:15 exists. 9:36 exists. But the noise of the jets we always hear first at 10pm. Plumes of flame in the night. The south side of the city is blacked out. Our side, the side with all the embassies and ritzy hotels filled with foreigners, shines with every light possible to tell the pilots where we are.
          Below us the city is spread. It’s an unfortunate word, spread, because associations attach: vulnerability, rape. When the jets fire their missiles at the refineries on the coast, transforming the beachfront into a miles-long arc of fire and steam, we tremble with fear and awe, men and women all feminine alike, hoping our sisters get it before we do. Spare us!
          This is a misogynist country, they warned us. We paused. No, but really, they said, and now look at us with our afternoons of headlines and frightened mimosas. The footage on our looming TVs: Look at that ocean view! On Day One, it was packed with families swimming and tanning in the perfect light. On Day Two, the camera team rang us from the lobby. They spilled into the suite carrying hours of jumpy footage. We watched it and we all drank together, talent and crew. Such class leveling! We felt proud to cleave together in the face of such adversity. In this hotel the channel’s expense account obtains indefinitely, and we pamper the camera team, with hamburgers and hot showers and bottles of booze. In the morning we coyly share the two tiny bathrooms and, self-organized, meet by the pool at 10am where we are served croissants and coffee and olives and eggs. Televisions and cell phones, all day, every day. The hotel is operating with a skeleton staff. Surely some of the angry, desperate men down below in the rubbled city look up at us, atop our hill, with envy.
          We are not so unsophisticated as to ignore the smell of burning buildings to the west. One of the team captures a great deal of footage: limitless towers of smoke bending inward and outward like dancing girls, vaporously fading upward into the sky. Helicopters fly in and out of the city, in and out. Not for us, not today at least. Our star, beautiful in her one-piece swimsuit, dives into the pool and when she emerges she sits by the railing, dries her hair, and drinks a glass of cava.

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The post 20. The Travel Channel appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

Afia handed the bowl of dried smoke fish to the customer, and then the lights went out, the third time this week.
          It wasn’t completely dark, of course. The night was clear and there was a sliver of moon, and some of the owners ran their own generators, so the market had only dissolved into a sort of gray twilight, with pockets here and there of bright light and black shadow. But the radios had mostly died, and the sudden outage had briefly stifled conversation on the street, so that for a number of moments Afia heard little except the surf on the shore behind her, the sea one hundred yards away but invisible now, its weedy tang somehow stronger than the smoke from the grill or Kosi’s deep fryer in the stall next door.
          The darkness was an inconvenience, but Afia kept cooking and the customers kept ordering—here’s a crowd of young people leaving the disco—and within an hour the lights returned. A few of the early fishermen arrived to sell their catch, but their stalls seemed unusually empty of both people and fish. A lull in street life incurred a brief wave of fatigue in her, but she rallied when the last of the clubs closed and the kids swarmed the street, looking for kebabs, plantains, and more beer. Two of the disco boys got into a fight in front of her stall, but it was nothing serious, and the vendors applauded and yelled and sprayed water on them until their friends dragged them away.
          Another lull. The kids had gone home. The vendors leaned on their elbows and craned their heads and gossiped. The end of her row should have been hectic with fishermen lugging out their ice-buckets of fish, but there was almost no one there, and the men who were seemed more interested in huddling together and whispering than getting their catch ready for sale. Afia drank a Coke and tried to stay awake. She was too old for this, she should let her daughters do more.
          The lights went out again. Now, with the crowds gone and some of the stalls shuttered, it was dark, it was quiet. The sound of the surf pounded even more strongly as dawn approached, and another sound, a overlapping series of watery thumps and susurrations, as of many people walking over wet sand. Curious, she stepped out of her stall to watch the blackness where she knew the sea began. There should have been lights on fishing vessels, and docks and buoys, and she did see some of those things, in the far distance, almost as far and unearthly as Venus, rising above. But around her, and around the neighbors who had joined her to watch, there was no light, and no noise except that of the army of walking things that have emerged from the sea and are even now looming out of the blackness, blotting out Venus and the rest of the predawn stars.

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The post 19. The Night Market appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We now complete our trilogy of actors who starred in Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar during its initial run! This time, we’re listening to “The Chicago Fraud Matter” featuring John Lund in the title role! This story features an investigation into the sudden death of a life insurance policy holder. But the dead man seemed to have not been healthy enough to be approved for his insurance. Did he fool the doctor who approved the policy? Will the insurers be forced to pay the beneficiary? Are we adding emphasis to the right syllables? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 374: The Chicago Fraud Matter appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

The duke was a kind master and a great man, but by G-d did he stink. Every six or eight months, when they couldn’t stand it any more, the servants would conspire to get the duke drunk and insensible, then swiftly put their plot into motion.
          At the signal from his valet, the big boys from the stables, perfumed handkerchiefs tied around their faces, would enter the bedroom and gently strip the duke bare. The clothes were immediately taken away to be laundered, as were the bedclothes. A fresh wig was substituted. The bathtub had been brought in at the same time. It was filled with rosewater, tepid so as not to shock the duke awake. The duke was submerged; lice departed his body in a panic, great families of them drowning in the lye-rich bath. Blooms of filth slicked the surface, reeking of shit. The chambermaids, gagging, with eyes watering, laved the duke all over, down to the last crust and crevice. Meanwhile the bed had been made up. The stable boys would then lift the duke from the bath, and the maids would drape him in a snow-white linen nightshirt and tuck him within the covers. Then everyone, micelike, would silently depart.
          What the duke thought of this, for he must have known, is not recorded. But for the boy in the basement, whose job it was to receive the tub of slime, empty it and clean it, each of these occasions was a delight. For when the stable lads laid down their bounty near the basement drainpipe and coughing took their leave, the boy, who would be a duke himself someday, he knew, would bar the door and bathe his own self in the dark water, every so often opening his throat wide to swallow great gulps of the gritty oily stuff, and so in this manner to absorb some of the greatness of the duke.
          And so he dreamed, and so it continued until the old duke died, and the basement boy, now grown strong and reliable, took upon himself the task of preparing the duke for his final rest, and the other servants, in sadness and gratitude, were only too happy to leave the task to him.

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Our Patreon listener Mark recommended we pay a visit to our Listener Library to check out “The April Fool’s Day Adventure” from The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes! Thanks, Mark! In this episode, Watson recounts one of his earliest escapades with the famed detective, in which the doctor joins a conspiracy to make Holmes the target of an April Fool’s prank. But when the joke becomes a genuine crime, it’s up to Holmes to uncover the truth! Will Holmes fall for this trick? Is Joshua a fan of Sherlock Holmes or is he a super fan? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 373: The April Fool’s Day Adventure appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We could have left the city as many others did, but mother insisted we hide in the cellar. Before he died, father had erected a false wall, behind which he had stored some food and wine. A lead pipe with a faucet brought water in from the spring and a sluice carried away our waste. When the British finally breached the city walls, we hid. On the second day a soldier found our hideout but I was lucky and managed to get a knife into his neck and close the secret panel before anyone else was alerted. We didn’t know how long we would be down there so we fed on the soldier for many days, cutting him apart on the altar and apologizing to the goddess for being unable to raise a flame to her.
          After a time the British left and a new family moved into our home. I sneaked up there one night and watched them as they slept. I knew them: a rich family, afrancesado when convenient, now, I assumed, loyal subjects of Ferdinand.
          This was a dilemma. To kill them would bring attention to the house, but if they stayed they would certainly discover us. In the end, I tainted their dinner with one of mother’s concoctions and drove the father mad. He murdered his wife and children and was hanged within the week.
          In the years that followed I tried to discourage attention. Children wandering at night might disappear, and their bodies might be found, but never near our home. I expanded the tunnels until they reached far outside the borders of Badajoz. Landlords fell drunkenly down stairs and broke their necks. Land agents drowned.
          We raised our children to study the Law by candlelight and deposit gold with Italian bankers. Soon our grandchildren were rich. They bought back our home and its land under other names, Hebrew and American names that no one would recognize. They visit on the important days and then return to the world, hearts refreshed by the grace of the goddess. Sometimes one or two die screaming at the hands of some witch-hunter or another, but mother, though certainly not young, still has many fertile years ahead of her and many more children yet to bear.

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Richard Widmark stars as a drifter named Jefferson in this episode of Suspense, “Too Hot to Live”! On a blisteringly hot summer day, Jefferson wanders into a small town only to lose his shoes and find a world of trouble. Did he commit the murder that he’s accused of committing? If not, is there any way to prove his innocence? What is Eric’s favorite book of the Bible? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

The post Episode 372: Too Hot to Live appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

He suffocates the final members of his family. He removes his shoes. Padding through this house of a hundred rooms, he listens for the ticks of the grandfather clocks and finding them he holds their hands until they stop moving. He shushes televisions and stereo speakers, he unplugs the noisy world. That evening he sleeps in the starched raucous-colored sheets of his childhood bed. In his dreams he is in the basement of a big old thing, composed of mud with hollows on the inside. Associations cluster: rabbit warrens, wasps, apartments built from masticated paper, mansions dug out, clutter and claustrophobia, the deeds of the day. It’s all too much.
          In the morning he gets to work.
          He has the house leveled, preserving only a few mementos. The staff are dismissed, and buried far away. The groundskeepers are let loose to produce their wildest fantasies, on the condition that, starting one mile from the house, the gardens and orchards and crops start to organize themselves, to diminish to a demure size, to display their more reserved colors, to whisper charmingly in the breeze of night, to leave their raw barbarian scents a mile down the road and grow more subtly perfumed.
          He hires the best, with his family’s money. The rubble of the house is carted away, the cellars excavated too, the earth scraped and hauled away. New servants ornament the new white home—of poured gleaming concrete with mica flakes, and new windows, every wall securely regimented with them—which emerges small but confident in the center of the new shapely low-lying gardens watered by the cleverly symmetrical and cedar-smelling pools, calm and undisturbed in the distant middle of the further wild world.
          In time he becomes a recluse. The family business is relegated to one hour in the day, the second hour before dawn, the worst hour anyway. Visitors yawn, but discreetly. The other hours he fills with reading and religious reflection. Every night before the evening meal he walks the hundred yards to the gravesite, waving away the attendants and the clouds of incense, and pisses on his family’s graves. If only their mouths were open, he thinks, and as he returns to his new white house his servants strip him of his clothes and rinse him and wrap him in fresh white robes in which he will take supper alone.

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The post 16. Purity appeared first on Ghoulish Delights.

We are two-thirds of the way through our tour of actors who starred in Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar during its initial run! This time, Edmond O’Brien is our titular investigator with the action-packed expense account in a story entitled “The Queen Anne Pistols Matter.” This episode sees Dollar hired to accompany the delivery of a pair of antique pistols. Why was the original courier attacked? What message are these pistols intended to send? Once we start talking about The Silence of the Lambs, can we stop? Listen for yourself and find out! Then vote and let us know what you think!

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