The Drabblecast

1.

When a spiral staircase appears in front of you, don’t panic. Just know that if you place your feet on that first step, it shows commitment. You can’t go back. You can only go up and up and up until you reach the very top.

Watch your step. That’s the main thing to remember. Some people think they can race to the top, or take the steps two at a time. All it takes is one stumble, one slip, and soon you’re tumbling, arms pinwheeling, shins banging, down, down, down.

You don’t want to be rejected by a spiral staircase. It’s painful.

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Drabbleclassics 8 – The Wish of the Demon Achtromagk (214)

By Charity Helton

On September 29, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Fantasy, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Strange

Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind.

It was silent. And soft. And dark…

Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horror (an ‘oh so huggable’ one) by Drabblecast favorite Eugie Foster.

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Drabbleclassics 7 – The Store of the Worlds (188)

By Charity Helton

On September 22, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Drama, Fantasy

Tompkins sighed. “What happens is this: You pay me
my fee. I give you an injection which knocks you out. Then, with the aid of certain gadgets which I have in the back of the store, I liberate your mind…”

This episode of Drabblecast starts with Norm recommending and playing an excerpt from Frank Key’s story anthology. In the feature we learn about Mr. Wayne, a man who visits the store of the world in order to discover his deepest desire. Is it simply an escape from a post-apocalyptic world, or is it something more?

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Drabblecast 339 – Trifecta XXVIII: Offbeat Afterlife

By Drabblecast

On September 18, 2014

In Drabblecast, Fantasy

The ghost in my attic is Margaret, but she lets me call her Margie. She was seventy-six years old when she died, and now that she’s a ghost she sits in her rocking chair day and night, holding a tiny baby in her arms. The baby rarely moves and almost never cries. His name is Gavin, and he is thin and wrinkly and covered in fine brown hair. Funny looking, as preemies often are, but sweet nonetheless. Margie keeps him wrapped in a blanket of cobwebs, which I think is disgusting. I’ve always hated spiders.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 52 – Fiction Editor Lagerklatsch

By Drabblecast

On September 17, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Interview

Drinks and shop talk with short fiction editors John Joseph Adams (Lightspeed Magazine), Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld), Scott K. Andrews (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) and Norm Sherman.

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Drabblecast 338 – The Crevasse

By Drabblecast

On September 11, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror

What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.

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Drabblecast 337 – The Only Game in Town

By Drabblecast

On September 4, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Walking back up the road toward home, I saw Rich Hartzell locking up his cabin. His car was stuffed to the roof with cardboard boxes and black trash bags; only the driver’s seat was empty.

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Drabbleclassics 6 – The Outsider (175)

By Charity Helton

On August 31, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Here it is again – the very first H.P. Lovecraft month special! Listen in as we try to figure out what it’s all about at the end of the episode!

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken…

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Drabblecast B-Sides 51 – Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You

By Drabblecast

On August 27, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Fantasy

If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.

I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.

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Drabblecast 336 – The Mouth of God

By Drabblecast

On August 21, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

There’s a dream you have.

It’s not a proper dream. It’s impatient, fired with urgency. It arrives without warning, veering suddenly out of the night.

You’re kneeling on the bridge. It’s late afternoon. Clouds mass low in the sky, seagulls wheel over the bridge spans, humidity hangs thick in the air. Cars speed by on either side of you, the whoosh of
their passage filling your ears.

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Drabblecast 335 – To Whatever

By Drabblecast

On August 17, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

H.P. Lovecraft Month continues with an originally commissioned story: “To Whatever” by Shaenon Garrity.

To know or not to know is the penultimate question in Lovecraftian horror. What mysteries lie beyond the wall of our understanding? What if we were to commune with whatever lay beyond that wall? Or in that wall? That is the crux of this week’s story.

Story Excerpt:

To whatever lives in the walls—

Please stop taking my half & half.
Let’s get this out of the way: I know you’re there. Don’t think I’m unaware of the scrabbling sounds, the walls creaking from your bulk, the way my razor in the morning is never exactly where I left it last night. Richard always said it was the building settling—as if a building, however old, could take apples out of the fruit crisper—but he was as wrong about that as he was about a lot of things beyond the scope of this note. And since he moved out I feel you’ve gotten bolder.

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Drabbleclassics 5 – Code Brown (29)

By Charity Helton

On August 11, 2014

In Comedy, Drabbleclassics, Sci-Fi

“We cannot destroy it- it’s too valuable” said Klugscheisser
“And yet, it would be dangerous to keep it. We must hide it in the last place that anyone would ever think of looking for it…”

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Drabblecast B-Sides 50 – The Nameless City

By Drabblecast

On August 11, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Lovecraft Month

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

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Drabblecast 334 – The Colour Out of Space

By Drabblecast

On August 11, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

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Drabblecast 333 – After the Cure

By Drabblecast

On August 2, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror

I was shot with the cure in the dark. Later, someone would tell me it was a Tuesday, but before the tranq dart I didn’t know such a thing existed. It was either day or night, hungry or sated, alive or dead.

Then there was the cure and I was hauled to the Sanitation Center to be processed: our identities to be confirmed, and if forgotten, to be assigned a name, a registration number, date of birth, address.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 49 – Trash

By Drabblecast

On July 29, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Drama, Fantasy, Strange

The day she left we forgot to take out the trash. At five-thirty in the morning, I heard the city trucks lumbering down the street with their mechanical, prehensile arms and remembered that we had forgotten to take out the trash. I didn’t care though. I knew that in a few hours I would help load the last of her boxes into the truck, and she would leave. Everything was expanding without me, and I felt like the room was growing until I was lost in and filled with its great, grey nothing.

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Drabbleclassics 4 – Annabelle’s Alphabet (129)

By Charity Helton

On July 22, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Drama, Fantasy

Annabelle’s mother closed her eyes. “Get it sharp,” she said. “Very sharp, so it doesn’t hurt much. I’ll boil some water.”

Somewhere in the house, far from the green places she’d known, baby Annabelle lay on her stomach and cried…

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Drabblecast 332 – Mister Bob

By Drabblecast

On July 22, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Strange

“It all began with the chicken in the end of the road,” she said.

“Pardon?” I gestured. “Could you say that again?”

Miss Sanderson reached out and tapped the translation device on the table, then picked it up and fiddled with its settings. She was the ugliest female of her species I’d ever seen– obscenely symmetrical features, pale hair and complexion, long limbs–and yet forever twirling a finger in her hair like she was trying to proposition me.

Disgusting!

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Drabblecast B-Sides 48 – Last Son of Tomorrow

By Drabblecast

On July 16, 2014

In Action, Drabblecast B-Sides, Drama, Fantasy

John was born with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and he often wondered why. But as a boy, it was simply wonderful to have those abilities. He could lift his father’s tractor overhead before he learned to read. He could outrace a galloping horse. He couldn’t be cut or bruised or burned. He could fly…