Sure:) Here you go:)
Pseudopod Episode 166
October 30th
Something There Is by Joe Nuh Zairep166 - Oct 30 - Something There Is by Joe Nazare [nuh-zair] Minimonkjoe@aol.com NO_URL
Welcome my friends to the show that never ends until it does, because it’s All Hallow’s Eve and somewhere, Michael Wincott is planning devil’s night even as across the world, the killers sharpen their bizarre and iconic weapons and young couples prepare to hook up at places with names like Devil’s Point and You’ll Definitely Be Murdered In A Curious Fashion If You Snog Here Cove.
Happy almost Halloween everyone, I’m Alasdair your host and this is quite definitely Pseudopod. Our story this week comes from Joe Nuh Zair whose work has appeared in anthologies and magazine like Harvest Hill, Dead in Common and Butcher Knives & Body Counts. Joe is a college professor specialising in the study of SF and gothic horror nad has had literary criticism essays in venues ranging from The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Studies in the Novel, Extrapolation, toThe Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the "Father" of Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Mellen Press; Ed. Carl Yoke and Carol Robinson). He is, as you’re about to find out, fond of Edgar Allen Poe and would like readers to remember one very important fact: in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor narrates the tale of his vengeance against Fortunato a half century after the fact. Our story picks up immediately from that point, and picks up on the hints of fear and remorse in Montresor's overtly brazen narrative.
Your narrator this week is the mighty BJ Harrison of classic tales who, through October will be reading Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw in four unabridged chapters. He also has an Edgar Allan Poe Collection on Audible.com and the
iTunes Music Store that contains The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and others."
So, pull up a chair, ignore the raven at the window and don’t drink the Amontillado just yet, because I have as tory for you and I promise you it’s true.
Halloween, that night where everything seems possible, where the past and the present collide and all the old ghosts come out to play. The night where we close the curtains early, the night where we make sure the pumpkins are lit and the night where every year, the long war between children and their teeth steps up to defcon one.
But it’s the ghosts I keep coming back to, the parade of ideas and people who are gone but not forgotten. I can’t shake the idea of a macabre carnival at this time of year, a long procession, an evolution of man for horror that begins with Pliny the Younger, talking excitedly about the story he’s just written about a haunted house.
After him come the 9th Hispana Legion, never quite home and never quite anywhere else followed by the headless horsemen, the reapers and the spring heeled jacks the figures who stalked the landscape and left nothing but death in their wake even though the story always survived. Then the doomed lovers, cycling endlessly through reunion, redemption, bloody murder, bloody suicide and vengeance and back again. The women in white and the women in black dancing with each other at least as much with the men with no heads or the soldiers, lost and forgotten in the fog of war. The people from Arkham County with the strange eyes and the gruff voices come next, followed by the scientist spiritualists, their banner one of Carnacki’s old electric pentagrams, shining neon blue. After them come the endless ranks of serial killers, arguing as they always do about why there are so many Screams and Saws whilst behind them, the little girls with hair over their faces dance and play in staccato, fast forward movements never quite human and never quite still.
The Mothmen come next. No one makes eye contact with them. No one can.
Then the ghosts, the true ghosts, flickering in and out like images half caught on film. Normal people, as beautiful and awful as that phrase suggests, each one unique, each one dead, each one aware of that. Some of them disappear into light or darkness, as they always do, but more take their place, as they always do. They’re shepherded along by two women, one with long dark hair, one with blonde. Both have their families with them, although there’s something odd about the dark haired one’s husband…
Then the hunters arrive and the parade comes to life. At their head are a group of people with the easy familiarity you only get when you grow up together. The blonde woman with the stake looks a little uncomfortable but her red headed friend can’t stop smiling and waving, whilst the young man with the eye patch next to her is grinning so broadly it looks like his head will split.
On the other side of her, the three men in trenchcoats are a study in contrasts. The dark haired one in the centre looks grim, the blonde one next to him keeps vamping out and striking poses and the blonde one on the other side of him, shorter, slighter, more mortal than the other two lights a cigarette and laughs.
Behind them, the older man with glasses he can’t stop playing with mutters something under his breath. The woman in the leather jacket next to him laughs the dirtiest laugh in the world, echoed by the tall, bald black man to his right. The laugh doesn’t quite reach his eyes. They’re still watching the blonde vampire, and always will be.
Then Highway to Hell by AC/DC reaches full volume and the ’67 Chevy Impala arrives. It’s a beautiful car and it knows it, sleek and black and low slung, coiled like a spring. The young man driving it is pounding away on the steering wheel, air drumming like a maniac and singing along whilst his brother, the one with long dark hair looks out of the window and broods. He’s good at that. In the back seat, an angel in a crumpled suit looks a little confused and doesn’t notice his finger tapping along with the beat.
After them, is silence but not absence. Something moves out in the dark, something unformed and shapeless but ready, slouching towards Jerusalem waiting to be born, to become next year’s horror, next year’s threat.
But that doesn’t matter because tomorrow night is Halloween, tomorrow night the parade goes by and we light our lanterns and we watch because it’s Halloween, and that’s what we do.
Happy Halloween everyone.
Pseudopod is a production of Escape Artists Incorporated, is released under a creative commons attribution non commercial no derivatives licence and Pseudopod is powered entirely by your donations. If you liked this story, please go to Pseudopod,org and click on feed the pod.
Our closing music is by Hopeful Machines, find more about them at
www.hopefulmachines.net And Pseudopod wants you to remember, it can’t rain all the time.