Pseudopod 374: FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS XIX: Blood On The Tracks – Departure, Transit, ArrivalGoing nowhere... faster...
“Midnight Express” by
Alfred Noyes“Midnight Express” first appeared in
This Week, November 3, 1935.
ALFRED NOYES (1880-1958) is primarily remembered as a poet, especially for his ballads “The Highwayman” and “The Barrel-Organ”. Aside from his poetry he wrote a large number of short stories intended to boost the national morale and small number of uncanny stories including this, “The Lusitania Waits” and “The Log of the Evening Star”. He published many novels including the post-apocalyptic
THE LAST MAN (1940) and his famed trilogy
THE TORCH BEARERS (1922-1930).
Read by
Paul Jenkins – has narrated for
Escape Pod, Pseudopod and
PodCastle a number of times (he was honoured to be asked to narrate the very first PodCastle episode!). His science fiction podcast novel
THE PLITONE REVISIONIST is available for free at
Podiobooks.com. His skeptical blog
NOTES FROM AN EVIL BURNEE, and his skeptical podcast
SKEPTICULE (aka “The Three Pauls Podcast“) can be found at the links.
“It was a battered old book, bound in read buckram. He found it, when he was twelve years old, on an upper shelf in his father’s library; and, against all the rules, he took it to his bedroom to read by candlelight, when the rest of the rambling old Elizabethan house was flooded with darkness. That was how young Mortimer always thought of it.”
“Destination: Nihil by Edmund Bertrand” by
Mark Samuels“Destination: Nihil by Edmund Bertrand” had its first appearance in
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR #20 edited by Stephen Jones.
MARK SAMUELS (born 1967) is the author of four short story collections
THE WHITE HANDS AND OTHER WEIRD TALES (Tartarus Press 2003),
BLACK ALTARS (Rainfall Books 2003),
GLYPHOTECH & OTHER MACABRE PROCESSES (PS Publishing 2008) and
THE MAN WHO COLLECTED MACHEN & OTHER STORIES (Ex Occidente 2010 and Chomu Press 2011) as well as the short novel
THE FACE OF TWILIGHT (PS Publishing 2006). His tales have appeared in both
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR and
THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY & HORROR. He has a new collection forthcoming from
Egaeus Press in 2014 and has been described by
Ramsey Campbell as “the British
Thomas Ligotti”: A description he is at odds with, since he shares few, if any, of Ligotti’s aims either as a contemporary philosopher or writer of weird fiction. He is also literary executor for the late
Edmund Bertrand. “How I came to be Bertrand’s literary executor is a convoluted affair and too long to go into here,” explains Samuels. “In any case, it’s certainly ironic, given that Bertrand (an American citizen, but of French ancestry, as his name suggests) was a staunch Anglophobe. Bertrand was born in Memphis, sometime during 1957, and died in a mysterious hotel fire whilst attending a convention in England in 2007. His stories chart the far reaches of madness, and were never collected together in a single volume. His main influences were European authors such as
Stefan Grabinski,
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte,
Dino Buzzati and
Jean Lorrain.”
Read by
Jorn Meyer – who is new to
PSEUDOPOD with this story and who is available for narration or voice work and can be reached at mail-at-joern-meyer.net
“There was no question now of keeping panic in check. Grey loped off along the aisle of the car in search of the conductor, or of the first person he encountered. A few rows further down he saw a man slouched in his seat, dressed in a rain mac and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that obscured his face. Grey hesitated before addressing the stranger, because he feared the face concealed in shadow. Would it be like that of the conductor? If it were, then he feared he would have reached a tipping point and might scream himself to death.”
“The Terminus” by
Kim Newman.
A slightly different version of “The Terminus” appeared in the fanzine
Sheep Worrying in 1981; this version appeared in
Fantasy Tales in 1985. “It’s pretty much the earliest story I sold professionally.”
KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes
THE QUORUM,
LIFE’S LOTTERY and
PROFESSOR MORIARTY: THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES; his non-fiction includes
NIGHTMARE MOVIES and BFI Classics studies of
CAT PEOPLE and
DOCTOR WHO. He has written plays for the theatre (
The Hallowe’en Sessions) and radio (
Cry-Babies), is a contributing editor to
Sight & Sound and
Empire magazines and reviews in
Video Watchdog. His official web-site can be found
here. He is also on Twitter as @AnnoDracula and his latest novel is
ANNO DRACULA: JOHNNY ALUCARD, fourth in the successful
ANNO DRACULA series. His next novel,
AN ENGLISH GHOST STORY, will be out in late 2014.
Your reader,
Siobhan Gallichan, is a voice-over artist available for work at macfadyan-at-gmail.com. Listen to Siobhan’s podcast at
The Flashing Blade or watch the show on
YouTube.
“‘Oh yes,’ Verdon told me, ‘disappearances from the underground are not uncommon. Every once in a while some unfortunate wanders off where he shouldn’t and meets with an accident. Sometimes our staff doesn’t come across the remains for years. Some people never do turn up. Those are the most interesting, I think. This pile.’
It was an impressive stack of manila folders. On the night of 9 October 1872 (which I like to think of as appropriately foggy) Mr Julian Selwyn-Pitt, a landscape painter, walked into Oxford Street station and was never seen again. Since 1872, fifteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four people had followed Mr Selwyn-Pitt into Verdon’s files. The figure was exclusive of all those whose disappearance was not reported and those, like Robert Webb, whose folders had not yet drifted down to settle in Verdon’s office.
‘So there are nearly sixteen thousand people lying around the tube somewhere?’”
Interstitial music is “Fearless Bleeder” by
Chimpy, available from
Music Alley.
Train sounds are from
SoundJay.com.
Cave drips are from
FreeSound.org.
Listen to this week's Pseudopod.
