Pseudopod 490: Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown

[Bdoomed]

Pseudopod 490: Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown

by Jon Padgett.

“Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” is a Pseudopod original. “As an adult human being, I’m an odd misfit, but I was truly a ghoulish child—small and rail thin with a large, square face capable of making the most hideous expressions (usually only for my own amusement in the bathroom mirror). I’m sure my dark humor and morbid bent are due in no small measure to an older brother who delighted in telling me scary stories almost every night of my early childhood. My brother pathologically despised me when we were kids and actively (and creatively) fed my fears and doubts when he wasn’t physically causing me discomfort or pain. My earliest memories are filled with his threats, creepy lies and bizarre, improvised stories. Many years later, they still haunt my imagination, and I wrote “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” with these childhood memories in mind.”

JON PADGETT lives in New Orleans with his spouse, their daughter, and two cats. Padgett has work out or forthcoming in Pseudopod, The Lovecraft eZine and Xnoybis. Padgett’s chapbook, THE INFUSORIUM, was released in spring of 2015, and his first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, is forthcoming from Dunhams Manor Press, June 2016. Later in 2016, Padgett–along with a team of editors and the artistic wizardry of Dave Felton–will be releasing the first issue of Vastarien: a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti and the authors who influenced and are influenced by him.

Your narrator – Paul Cram – is a scrappy actor who’s character in movies always seems to be the one that dies. His latest role in at Anniversary as him awake at night seeing things that no one wants to admit are happening. While Paul still considers his voice to be somewhat new to the world of audio books, he has a few full-length novels under his belt, including the love story Flirting With Death set against the beauty of Lake Michigan & the Zombie Apocalypse. When not acting, Paul can be found out in the woods of Minnesota, arguing pop-culture with his little brother. Check out Paul’s website at PaulCramActor.


I was seven years old the first time my brother tried to kill me.



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[Ichneumon]

I have yet to listen to an Escape Artist story that did not frustrate me when it came to the portrayal of insects and other arthropods. Daddy longlegs (Opiliones) do not have venom glands, they do not have fangs, and they cannot poison you! I understand that this was from a child's perspective and it is a common urban legend, but it still gets to me. And why do the characters who like insects always have to be creepy and unsocial?

I did feel for the kid, trapped and terrorized in his own home.

[Jon Padgett]

Ichneumon, I understand your frustration, but the Daddy Longlegs venom urban legend was not written out of ignorance.  It was intentional--an oral tale that was repeated by friends and family during my childhood again and again.  The scientific reality behind it is unimportant to the narrative.  Also--to me--the protagonist's creepiness has more to do with being the victim of a creepy, abusive brother than it does with his preoccupation with insects.

Hope that's clarifying.

Thanks for the feedback.  And thanks for listening!

[Tango Alpha Delta]

I don't know if it helps assuage your frustration, Ichneumon, but when I heard that part I thought, "Ugh, poor kid - falling for that old legend!"

Jon, well done!

Early on, the set up reminded me a bit of Peter Straub story, and the part of my brain that likes to ruin things worked out the likely possible plot twists for me, yet this still hit home for me. That ending delivered in a way I did not expect, so the ruining-things part of my brain is all sulky, now. (Screw him, right?)

And Paul's reading was spot on. All-around satisfying experience this week.

[Unblinking]

Hmmm...  certainly compelling and sympathetic until it takes the turn where he sets out to fill the shoes of his tormentor.  In this case if he had killed his brother, as horrible as that would be, I could perhaps see it as sympathetic given that he was very much afraid for his life and any other action he'd tried to take only resulted in more torture.  But, becoming the tormentor, not so much.  I think it works as horror, but at that point in the story I was no longer sympathetic to the protagonist (which was probably the intent). 

Even if I were sympathetic to him torturing his brother, I couldn't help but think that he had not learned the most basic lesson from his experience:  That if his older brother really hated him that much his older brother made a mistake by torturing him instead of killing him because by leaving him alive his older brother left the opportunity for the tables to be turned.  And now, with him apparently becoming the torturer in return, he is leaving himself vulnerable in the exact same way.  I would think that this would foreshadow him being killed by his brother at the first possible opportunity... if it weren't for the last line about him killing his brother instead, so the ending was pretty flat for me.

[Anoton115]

The first part of the story did quite an effective job of conditioning me to hate the narrator's tormentor brother on the narrator's behalf. To be fair, there is a passing attempt to explain the elder brother's behavior in the form of jealousy, but as this serves to make the violent abusiveness more believable without quite excusing it, it does nothing to undermine our disapproval of the character.

This effective conditioning is essential to the story's delivery. It made me sympathetic to the brother's comeuppance. The bees in the box spring, at first incomprehensible to me, paid off beautifully in the scene where the formerly dominant brother now found himself complaining of a buzzing in his ears. As others have mentioned, I found the part about the daddy long legs venom unbelievable -- the sort of thing a young child might believe though, so it fit. And since I did not believe (but was willing to accept that the narrator did) I thought at first that the whole thing was a well deserved prank.

To be honest, Padgett did surprised me a little bit with the ending. Once I got past the notion that the poison was real and the brother was actually sick, I half expected the twist to turn into a full 360 rotation, with the dying brother becoming the new host for "Sam". But to reveal in the final lines that Sam really was fake, the brother (however belatedly) repentant, and the narrator starkly unforgiving, was actually brilliant horror. It foregoes inhuman monsters or supernatural horrors in favor of painting a simple picture of evil turned back upon its source. That sudden flip from sympathizing with the narrator the whole story long and then suddenly fearing what he became at the very end was unexpected and chilling. Nicely done.

[dagny]

Full disclosure: I read this story before I heard it, and I hated the last line. I really thought that it ruined the story and should have been taken out.

After hearing the story read aloud, though, I completely changed my mind. The last line crystallized the narrator's transformation into something different, something dangerous.

I loved this story. Well done, both in writing and narration.