Norm brings in the New Year with an original Drabblecast story by author Tim Pratt! This story is a sequel to last year’s Holiday Special story, “Comfort and Joy,” check that one out here!
She was a blonde — the kind of blonde to make a bishop bite through his altar cloth. I used to be a bishop, but that was about seventeen-hundred years ago, so I swiveled away on my stool, took a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the bar, and went back to checking my list…
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This Drabblecast B-Sides episode brings you “St. Darwin’s Spirituals,” a new tale from D.K. Thompsons’s Saint Darwin’s Spirituals series. You can check out our previous installments Heart of Clay, A Last Kiss for Lazarus Winters, and Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Who Do Not Believe.
One women’s quest for the truth will take her down the darkest of alleys and the most sinister of delights.
Story Excerpt:
Despite my profession, I have never considered myself to be a holy man. Curious about all things supernatural, certainly—ever since I first lowered Darwin’s goggles over my wide-eyes and could see for myself the world I’d been blind to. When I saw the ghosts that day as a boy, I believed. But belief does not equate holiness. Even the demons believe.
No, I am not a holy man. But I have always prided myself on being a practical spiritualist.
This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!
So enjoy:
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This Drabblecast B-Sides episode features another from D.K. Thompson Saint Darwin’s Spirituals series, which includes Heart of Clay and A Last Kiss for Lazarus Winters. This one is called “Blessed Are Those Who Have Seen and Do Not Believe.”
This fantastical story follows two sinister individuals and their brush with the divine.
Story Excerpt:
Despite my profession, I have never considered myself to be a holy man. Curious about all things supernatural, certainly—ever since I first lowered Darwin’s goggles over my wide-eyes and could see for myself the world I’d been blind to. When I saw the ghosts that day as a boy, I believed. But belief does not equate holiness. Even the demons believe.
No, I am not a holy man. But I have always prided myself on being a practical spiritualist.
This story is available to our $10/month B-Sides subscribers! Not a member yet? Here’s how you can support the show!
Drabblecast B-Sides: <a href="http://www.drabblecast.org/donate/">Donate</a>
The Drabblecast Reborn! Yeah, it’s happening! There’s just 48 hours left to be a part of it, folks. That’s right, our Drabblecast Reborn Kickstarter Campaign comes to a close this Wednesday, October 17th @ 7 pm EST/4 pm PST.
In our recap, Norm wraps up the final Drabblecast Relaunch Prelaunch episode with gratitude, news, and an assortment of limited 48 hour opportunities!
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Drabblecast Fan Zimmerman goes over his first Drabblecast love, remembering his trip through the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska, in this Drabblecast Relaunch Prelaunch fan pick. The smallness we feel in big places; the conversations we have with ourselves.
The real lesson of life is to laugh. “Because life, no matter how dark, when read as a comedy, is filled with impossible laughter.”
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This episode of the Drabblecast brings you “A Last Kiss for Lazarus Winters,” another story in D.K. Thompson’s Saint Darwin’s Spirituals series.
D.K. Thompson was the host and co-editor of PodCastle, a fantasy fiction podcast, for five years, and has narrated audiobooks by Tim Pratt, Greg van Eekhout, and James Maxey, among others.
I was born again on New Year’s Eve, full of broken promises, and slick and sticky with two kinds of blood. One of them was a ghost’s. That didn’t surprise me, though. I’ve seen my share of ghost blood.
I’d spent most of my life working with spirits and principalities — tracking ghosts, and making demands of them. That’s what people hired me for. But I wasn’t one of Darwin’s spiritualists, though I’d read his Origin of the Spirits and wore the goggles he’d fashioned. No, the spiritualists aided the spirits, providing a bridge between the living and the dead to help care for them. Me? I took all of Charlie Darwin’s studies and tools, and crossed those bridges to make certain demands of ghosts. I was a spiritual extortionist.
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Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes; rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus; wickedly-curved shards of brown glass; bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt; and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary…
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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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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.
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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Thomas takes his lunch outside the shelter, on one of the park benches that look out over the interstate and down all the way to the containment pond. He has wondered whether a passerby seeing him from the highway would know whether he worked at the shelter or was one of its clients. He has had this thought most days that he has sat here. Today, though, his attention has been arrested by a small patch of gooselike objects floating out on the containment pond. If they are geese, it will be the first time he has seen a living thing on that pond.
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Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time…”
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Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job. She could no longer afford to be choosy about it, either; her oxygen tax was due, and you didn’t have to be a medical doctor to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to breathe vacuum.
You didn’t have to be, but Cynthia was one. Or had been, until the allegations of malpractice and unlicensed experimentation began to catch up with her. As they had done, here at Faraday, six weeks ago…
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Presently it rose, and with a shuffling walk it supported itself along the bars until it reached the bucket. With a sigh it plunged its hands inside.
Little Useless inched closer and watched while the creature cupped the salt water and brought it to its face: not to drink, but to moisten its skin…
This episode of the Drabblecast continues H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month with an eye towards Lovecraft’s fascination with and misgivings about the sea. It starts with a quote from Dagon, which kicked off the very first H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month. In the drabble, there is more to a fisherman’s remarkable sea wife than meets the eye. In the feature, a nod to Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a young girl living among humans who act savagely encounters a sympathetic, otherworldly Deep One. She faces hard questions: where does she truly belong, and where should her loyalties lie?
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In some parts of the world — Austria, Croatia, Hungary — they still remember. They understand. You can’t have something bright without having something dark to balance it. If you’ve got St. Nicholas, you also need the Krampus…
This episode of the Drabblecast opens with Norm’s reflections on the holidays, Santa Claus, and the origins of flying reindeer. In the drabble, the mayhem of a large family’s holiday dinner leads to a darkly humorous tragedy. In the feature, an unsavory petty criminal has a chance encounter with a dying old man who confides that years ago Santa bestowed upon him a miracle, a wish, to teach the true meaning of Christmas. Unfortunately, as they both learn, it comes with a catch..
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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.
Podcast: Download
Kyle lifted another lightsaber. “Want one? They’re not as random or clumsy as a flamethrower.”
“Sh*t. The geek is strong in this one. Sure, Jedi me.”
Kyle tossed it to her with a grin. Hang on Grandpa. We’re coming…
Norm starts this week’s Drabblecast starts with a bbardle about Phantom Claus, to get us in the Halloween spirit. The two part Horror World 2025 is concluded. We rejoin Ben to see if he is any closer to rescuing his grandfather from bedeviled robo-zombies.
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It started in the cemetery, like these things usually do. Everyone knows being in a cemetery after dark’s a bad idea, which is exactly why Kyle had begged his grandpa to take him…
This episode of Drabblecast is a Halloween Special where our (g)host Norm gives us suggestions on how to simultaneously celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month (and Halloween). He also provides information on Phantom Claws, the ghost of a vengeful murdered Santa. The feature story follows Kyle on an escapism holiday to Horror World, an amusement park with violent sentient robot zombies and android wolf men.
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That’s when I saw it. A thing — no, not even a thing, just an impression of a thing; a momentary imperfection in that seamless blue — that teased at the edge of my vision. My eye flicked toward it, but it either whipped away faster than the eye could follow or it hadn’t really been there to begin with…
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