PodCastle Escape Artists, Inc

* Author : Lavie Tidhar

* Narrator : Ian Stuart

* Host : Eleanor R. Wood

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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Previously published by Apex Magazine and as PodCastle episode 304





Content warning for violence





Rated PG-13

Titanic!

by Lavie Tidhar

10 April 1912

When I come on board the ship I pay little heed to her splendour; nor to the gaily–strewn lines of coloured electric lights, nor to the polished brass of the crew’s jacket uniforms, nor to the crowds at the dock in Southampton, waving handkerchiefs and pushing and shoving for a better look; nor to my fellow passengers. I keep my eyes open only for signs of pursuit; specifically, for signs of the Law.

The ship is named the Titanic. I purchased a second–class ticket in London the day before and travelled down to Southampton by train. I had packed hurriedly. I do not know how far behind me the officers are. I know only that they will come. He made sure of that, in his last excursion. The corpses he left were a mockery, body parts ripped, exposed ribcages and lungs stretched like Indian rubber, he had turned murder into a sculpture, a form of grotesque art. The Japanese would call such a thing as he a yōkai, a monster, otherworldly and weird. Or perhaps a kaiju. I admire the Japanese for their mastery of the science of monstrosity, of what in our Latin would be called the lusus naturae. I have corresponded with a Dr Yamane, of Tokyo, for some time, but had of course destroyed all correspondence when I escaped from London.

And yet I cannot leave him behind. I had packed hurriedly. A simple change of clothes. I had not dressed like a gentleman. But I carry, along with my portmanteau, also my doctor’s black medical bag; it defines me more than I could ever define myself otherwise; it is as much a part of me as my toes, or my navel, or my eyes; and inside the bag I carry him, all that is left of him: one bottle, that is all, and the rest were all smashed up to shards back in London, back in the house where the bodies are.

 

Unfortunately we don’t have the full text to this one, but you can read the rest of the story here!

* Author : Marisca Pichette

* Narrator : Julia Rios

* Host : Kiran Kaur Saini

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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PodCastle 834: All the Better to Taste You is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for end of life and misgendering.





Rated PG-13

All the Better to Taste You

by Marisca Pichette

 

This morning I swallowed the Wolf.

I started with oatmeal — sweetened bitter by fresh maple syrup, sticky all the way down. On top I poured mead inherited from drunken bees bumbling through the windows I always leave open — wide, gaping, hungry.

I finished with the Wolf. He’s quite small now; time and peace have removed his claws, decades of sweetness have rotted out his teeth. An infestation of fleas conjured by my stepsister forced him to shave completely. His final years were pale, bald, shivering as I carried him from room to room.

At the end, all that remained to feed his once-formidable muscles were nightmares. First mine, then his — rousing him gasping at midnight. I brought him cocoa, warm milk with a dash of honey.

At the end, I slept soundly, snuggled in a bed that learned to fit me. I stopped having nightmares years before I swallowed the Wolf whole.

He stirs in my belly now. Treacle-slow, contemplative, tame. He knew today would come before I ever thought to make his end.



“You’ll eat me up,” he said the day we met. I wore my white cotton dress, cornflowers embroidered along the hem. He lay in bed under a blanket stitched of lace and grandmother skin.

Then he was large, gray as ashes, eyes algae-green. I’m sorry to say I was scared of him, thin as I was, still within reach of my teenage years. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would be stronger than the Wolf.

“With treats and dreams and moon-blood,” he told me the day I moved into the guest room. One suitcase, a twin bed dressed in faded linens. My hands — naked, cold. Standing there, one hallway away from him, I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I wondered if I’d had any choice to make.

We’d run out of space in my mother’s house. After college, my stepsister had married and brought the Woodsman home. It had never been a mansion, equipped with only enough rooms for a mother and her daughters. The addition of the Woodsman meant the subtraction of someone else.

My mother asked if I would mind moving out, living with our only other relative: the Wolf.

“Don’t let her bite you,” she told me as I packed pads and protein bars into my suitcase.

“It’s he,” I replied, resentful and a little petulant. I knew a little about wolves. My stepsister had known a few in college, though only tangentially. They came more to some families than others, and never before the age of sixty. He was our first, as far as I knew.

“No, it’s she,” my mother huffed. “She was your grandmother, before.”

“That doesn’t matter. Now he’s a wolf.”

She gave me a hand-me-down cardigan and left the room.



When I moved in, he cooked for me. Quiche in the morning, martinis at lunch, Bolognese for supper. His table manners gave me my first nightmares, mixed up with cold toes and shifting shadows. I rose each morning exhausted, longing for home. The cottage was too quiet. The Wolf didn’t speak much. He seemed as uninterested in my presence as he was unbothered by it. He spent more time in the garden, while I perused the living room,

* Author : Eleanna Castroianni

* Narrator : Kat Kourbeti

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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PodCastle 833: This Wooden Heart is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for death and references to war and genocide.





Rated PG-13

This Wooden Heart

by Eleanna Castroianni

 

 

It starts with a seed in your grandfather’s beard.

Before you were born, when you and your brother were still seeds tucked deep inside your parents’ bodies, your grandfather dreamed for a while: of grainy bark, of sun-kissed leaves, of sweet purple fruit and of milky poison sap.

Your grandpa: you knew him for a while. He had the eyes of someone claimed by something bigger; the eyes of someone who has known secrets that take root deep below.

He had the eyes of your brother.

Your brother: you knew him for a while. His fire burned too bright. And everyone who shines brightly is sent to exile. To this day, your mother thinks her son — your only brother — is imprisoned on a faraway island.

She doesn’t know that your brother dreams of grainy bark and sun-kissed leaves. She doesn’t know that what started with a seed in her father’s beard has grown wiry roots and curly tendrils around this family’s hearts.

She can feel the thorns. She can hear the faint beating. She will clutch at her chest with every long breath. But she doesn’t know.

It starts like this.

 



 

The story of your grandmother goes like this — or so they told you.

Rumour had it that the fig grove surrounding the church of Saint Yerasimos in Tholaria could hide one from human eyes. When the Ottomans and the Moors raided, people took to the grove. They knocked on the trees and the spirits of the trees answered. They welcomed them, one trunk now holding two souls.

In the thick shade of the fig trees, with no birds singing, no cicadas trilling, no bees buzzing, the priest eyed your grandmother with a smirk on his goatish features. The irreverent call priests he-goats, but he truly was one: shiny horns and black jewel eyes, part of the beastfolk of Yerakari. He was the spitting image of Dark Father, one of the Cruel Saints that are honored only in Messara Valley. No doubt this chilling resemblance made him, ironically, popular with the pious. Goats have herbivore eyes; his eyes were a predator’s.

“It will cost you,” he said. “The church has needs, you know that, child.” He stroked the heavy cross hanging from his neck. The little jewels tucked in the insets must have cost a fortune. Among them, rubies shone bright red. Rubies were a sign of someone who had traded with the Ottomans. Someone who herded the serfs for the sake of the master.

She clenched her jaw. Of course. The beastfolk of Yerakari cared about one thing only: money. Sometimes it took the form of business, sometimes of sheer thievery. When it came to the church, the beastfolk were a natural partner to the biggest thieves in the country.

“Name the price,” she said.

The he-goat went silent for a moment to briefly weigh the odds. “Forty aiyes. With interest.”

That was a year’s income for a spinner, in good times. Your grandmother was resourceful; she could find a way to pay the instalments. “Expensive, but you have a deal. I have an upfront of ten.”

“Splendid. Dark Father thanks you.” His goaty eyes shone with greed, and his long-fingered human hands,

* Author : Rebecca Buchanan

* Narrator : Nicola Chapman

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives 1 (Belanger Press)





Rated PG



~ Five ~

Dinner was not silent. While we sat in the kitchen, sipping soup and munching on bread and mutton, Miss Couper maintained an animated lecture on the tumuli and barrows of the British Isles and the Continent.

“Wayland’s Smithy being a prime Neolithic example. And then there’s Maeshowe up on Orkney. Chambered cairn. Unique to the Orkneys. Don’t see that anywhere else. Well, that we know of. Could change at any moment. Always making new discoveries. Even the Americans are doing good work, digging up Indian mounds —”

“Miss Couper, could you pass the salt, please?” I held out my hand, smile stiff.

“Eh? Oh, aye.”

Miss Baxter hid a smirk behind a bite of mutton.

Ailis and the other two students, whom I now knew to be Judith Fleming and Beatrice Gordon, sat across the table from me. They remained alarmingly quiet, their gazes fixed on their plates. Like Ailis, Judith and Beatrice also wore older dresses: all charity students, then, without the funds to travel home for the holiday.

Mrs. Fearghasdan sat at the head of the table, frowning with concern.

Holmes hovered around the edges of the room, watchful.

I cleared my throat, shaking some salt into my soup. “How will all of you be celebrating the holiday, then? Cider and carols after church? Will you be bringing a tree in?”

Miss Couper raised her spoon. “Interesting history to that —”

“No tree, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Fearghasdan interrupted. “But we plan for a Yule log in the main hearth in the great dining hall. Dawn services at St. Giles, of course.”

“And you, Miss Morstan?” Miss Baxter smiled at me, her eyes gleaming. “Will you be burning a Yule log?”

I set aside the salt, folding my hands in my lap. From across the table, Ailis watched me through her hair.

“I do recall that you and . . . oh, what was her name? Weaver? Walker?”

“Mrs. Webster.”

Miss Baxter clapped her hands. “Yes, that’s right! Webster! The two of you would slip away at the oddest times of the year.” She turned to Miss Couper and continued in a loud whisper, “Did you know that Miss Morstan here was the only student at the Academy who had her own nanny? The rest of us, of course, had long outgrown our nannies, leaving them behind in the nursery. But, well, I suppose when one is born in a distant heathen land, one needs some sort of comfort when one rejoins civilization.”

Miss Couper shifted uncomfortably, her expression uncertain.

“You are quite right, Evelyn.” I smiled thinly, holding my back and shoulders so stiff that they began to ache. Breathe. In, out. “It was a shock to leave the beauty and warmth of India for Scotland. It took me some time to come to appreciate the lochs and moors and heaths — beautiful, but a spare and striking beauty in comparison to India. And, of course, I had just lost my mother. My father, loyal down to his marrow, would not abandon his duty to the Queen. And so Mrs. Webster kindly agreed to accompany me back to my homeland, to love and care for me as if I were her own daughter. And I came to care for her as a second mother — but more, as a role model, an example of compassion and honor and courage. The sort of woman I could only hope to become myself,

* Author : Rebecca Buchanan

* Narrator : Nicola Chapman

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives 1 (Belanger Press)





Rated PG

The Adventure of the Faerie Coffin: Being the First Morstan and Holmes Occult Detection

by Rebecca Buchanan

 

Dramatis Personae

Miss Mary Morstan — a governess with a secret, fiancée of Dr. John Watson

Mr. Sherlock Holmes — a consulting detective of ruthless logic

Mrs. Edith Fearghasdan — a concerned headmistress

Miss Evelyn Baxter — not a friend of Miss Morstan

Miss Susanna Couper — an opinionated teacher

Ailis, Judith, and Beatrice — students with a shared secret

Miss Maighread MacPherson — a teacher skilled at uncovering secrets

Mrs. MacPherson — her mother

Mrs. Webster — Miss Morstan’s former governess and mentor

Mrs. Forrester — Miss Morstan’s current employer, a supposedly respectable society matron

Dr. John Watson — Mr. Holmes’s flatmate and partner in criminal investigations, Miss Morstan’s fiancé





~ One ~

“Miss Morstan. May I join you?”

I closed my eyes, shutting out the chaos of the rail station. The sounds of whistles, shouts, and carolers were only slightly dulled by the window.

Of course he was here.

I inhaled slowly, feeling the breath fill my chest, spread through my arms and down my legs; an old habit, learned long ago at the feet of one far more skilled than me.

Calmer now, I turned and offered him a smile. “Of course, Mr. Holmes. Please, have a seat.”

He was not dressed in his usual attire. His clothes were not neat; rather, they were stained and wrinkled and slightly too large for his frame. His shoes were scuffed. The glasses that perched on his nose — pink from the cold — subtly changed its length and shape. The threadbare hat did much the same for his head, hiding his thinning hair.

Of course he had altered his appearance. No doubt he had been following me from the moment I left my rooms at Mrs. Forrester’s home. I should never have declined his dinner invitation the previous evening. There had been something in my note — a curious curve to an s, an odd slant to a t, a wrinkle, a stain — that had piqued his curiosity.

And so here he was, right where and when I least wanted him.

How John tolerated it, I failed to understand.

He settled easily into the seat opposite, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap. Silent. Still. Waiting.

We stared at one another as the whistle blew loud and piercing, and continued to stare as the train lurched forward, down the track, north, away from London. Only when we reached the outskirts of that great city did he finally speak.

“You are not breaking your engagement with Watson.” A statement, not a question.

“No.”

“You have only ever served as a governess in London, therefore you are not paying a sentimental visit to previous charges.”

“Correct.”

“This train is bound for Edinburgh. Your mother’s family hails from that country originally, Deòireach being her surname. You were born and lived with your family in India until you were eight. After your mother’s death, your father sent you to the same boarding school that she had attended. The Frazier Academy. You remained there until you were seventeen, at which point you traveled south to seek respectable employment.

* Author : Farah Naz Rishi

* Narrator : Nadia Niaz

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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Previously published as PodCastle 526





Rated PG-13

When Shadow Confronts Sun

By Farah Naz Rishi

[Allah] will say, “Enter among nations which had passed on before you of jinn and mankind into the Fire.” Every time a nation enters, it will curse its sister until, when they have all overtaken one another therein, the last of them will say about the first of them, “Our Lord, these had misled us, so give them a double punishment of the Fire.” He will say, “For each is double, but you do not know.” (7:38)



The paan seller’s cart has a very particular smell: burnt roses, sugar syrup, cumin. Spicy and sweet, like Nani’s sticks of sage, the ones she burns every Sunday after fajr to ward off jealous eyes and jealous spirits. But I am hungry and I breathe it in, letting the newfound familiarity of the fragrance settle into my bones.

Perhaps if I smell like paan, this world would accept me as one of its own — because that’s what Pakistan is in Ramadan. Its own world.

The paan seller greets us. The smell of his wares is its own lighthouse in the bustle of the market, still crowded in the long days of Ramadan. Beside me, Sayf’s chappals slap against the bottom of his bare feet with his every step. Nani is ahead, as she always is, her chin high and her dupatta low, revealing silvery strands of hair. She is very much at home here.

I don’t really like paan; it tastes too much like grass and birdseed. But the paan seller with his pink and yellow teeth always gives Nani free paan and affectionately calls her Nani-ji. She loves paan, so I want to like it, too.

The paan seller smiles at Sayf, my twin brother. And then he sees me. His smile falters, as it has every time he has seen me these past few weeks.

“There is the paani bachi,” he says. Water child. I feel my own eyes brew with quiet annoyance. Mine are blue. Nani says blue eyes are a bad omen. It means I carry a watery, unstable personality. What she really means is rebellious. Secretly, though, I think she means this with affection.

Sayf has brown eyes, round and gently inquisitive. He is petting a donkey’s velvet nose a few feet from the cart. His lashes are almost as long as the animal’s.

“Maybe she’ll look like Aishwarya Rai when she grows up,” the paan seller suggests in Urdu. Whether he is trying to comfort me or Nani, I’m not sure. But I know he’s spewing nonsense. I am too short for my twelve years, my hair and eyebrows too thick and unruly, and my skin is just a shade too dark, even here. And now I am angry.

Her blood pressure has prevented Nani from being able to fast in years; she takes the free paan he has offered. “Maybe,” is all she says. I can’t see her face.

Warm fingers suddenly fold themselves between mine. Sayf smiles at me; besides Nani, he’s the only one that ever does. He reminds me that despite the paan seller’s coarseness, I still like it here. Flaws and all. I press my fingertip into one of his dimples, which makes his smile only wider.

The azaan begins to echo through the market, a sound that gleams through the smog-tinted air.

Nani sneaks the paan in her mouth and chews as she strides ahead. The market’s walls of stands and carts narrow, though many of them are closed during the day for the monthly fast. Above us, colorful signs plastered in Urdu — which I’d never learned to rea...