The Narcofod

Excerpt:
When the sounds had faded away, Kato squeezed out of the log and looked about. A wild boar snored atop the log, an ornate vase precariously balanced between its tusks. The skeleton of a horse stood tethered to a stump. Blue and green marbles were scattered beside the log, spelling out “CAMOUFLAGE,” while red marbles lay on the log’s other side, spelling “MARBLE.” An owl hung upside down in midair, tangled in fishing line that dangled from the overcast, and robust orange grasshoppers marched single file in a large circle.

Kato continued his journey through the logfall. The fog to the north had advanced some, but not enough to be of concern. He stopped now and then, hearing faint cries, drummings, the clinking of wine glasses or chain mail — as if the strange properties of the logs had begun to resonate across the land. Was there any danger he might be swept up in endless imaginings? What potent brew had the daughter of God instilled in the logs? Or was it just an artifact of the manufacturing or distribution process? He had no way of knowing, or learning. Yet rather than be alarmed by his situation, he felt ever more at home here, as if this were a safe haven from the real world and its dangers. After all, the logs had always been good to him — in many ways his closest friends and allies.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:59 — 34.8MB)

Excerpt:
“Enough!” Kato said. “I don’t want to hear any more bickering for a while.” He gathered the girls about him. “Just stay close, okay? Don’t go out of sight again.” He counted them with a finger that trembled with emotion.

“What happened to your horse?” Vickie asked.

“It’s gone,” he said, counting them again, and still again.

“But we want to ride in it some more,” an in-between said.

“Stand still! I’m trying to count!” he scolded, because the count kept coming out wrong, very wrong, and when he had convinced himself there could be no mistake, he asked, “Why are there eight of you?”

“Eight?” they said. They took turns counting, coming up with eight as well.

“Which of you doesn’t belong?” he asked.

They looked among themselves, then said with a singsong whine, “It’s just us!”

He looked them all over, and for the life of him he could not pin down which was new. “Let’s go,” he said, just wanting to get them to their aunt’s before something else happened. “Hold hands, understand? Don’t let go no matter what.”

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:58 — 24.7MB)

Excerpt:
The eel slithered to and fro, clearly out of his element. “Well, I can juggle.” Five stones shot up out of the sand, and the eel set them to dancing in the air.

“Wow!” Kato watched in amazement. “That’s great!” He noted how the eel’s body sparked and pulsed, and how from time to time the stones clanked together, probably hematites and certainly made of metal. “Electromagnetic induction, am I right? You’re using your electric current to induce a magnetic field, and that is what you use to manipulate the stones.”

“That’s how I do it?” the eel said. “Yes! That’s how I do it!” He froze with the complexity of the notion, and the stones fell to the sand. “Oops.” The eel tried to get them going again, but could not.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said anything,” Kato apologized as the eel’s head sank lower.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 27.6MB)

Excerpt:
Kato remained amazed that he had made a kite that could fly, and while it didn’t zip about like the others, he could appreciate its little movements, dips and surges and feints of a more subtle nature, a delicate dance that began to speak to him.

For as it moved about up there, he became aware of its diaphanous nature, and how it didn’t resemble a kite so much as it did a woman. The Diaphanous Woman. It was she up there, doing that subtle dance, which wasn’t a dance at all but a struggle. Her hands were at her neck, clawing at something there. A collar? No, a choker chain! He could see the panic in her face, the mouth beginning to pucker, the tongue protrude, and the chain drew tighter still, made that way by a line descending towards him, to his straining hands–

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:28 — 37.1MB)

Excerpt:
Tucking the paper wad in a pocket, he continued down the corridor, which had an unmistakable downward slant. He walked for several hours. He walked for a day, a week, a month. And still he had not reached the end. To help pass the time he pulled out a rubber band and worried it between his fingers until it broke, then another, and another, to the point where he dared not waste any more. After several months, wearied from so much walking and getting nowhere, he leaned against the cold corridor wall and listened to the scribbling of pens on paper, the tapping of fingers on keys, the blup-blup, clank, gulp, and splash of coffee being brewed, stirred, drank, spilled–

“Excuse me,” he called out. “Excuse me. Have I reached the hacks yet?”

Screams of outrage issued from the offices. All form of object sailed out into the corridor, slamming the wall about him. He dodged a coffee-maker, ducked a monitor stringing a keyboard, leaped over a shattering mug, and hurried onward.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:59 — 34.8MB)

Excerpt:
He negotiated a contortionist’s nightmare of rubber bands, setting off several, and stepped into what proved to be the kitchen. The woman stood over a hot stove, ladle in hand, preparing a spaghetti and meatball dish more puzzling than the house. “Uh, hi,” he whispered. “I’m looking for the lady of the house.”

She glanced around at him, a woman as nondescript as they come: middle-aged, plain-featured, raggedy-dressed. Yet there was something tantalizingly beautiful in her domestic pose, the frizzy penumbra of rebelliousness in her drawn-back hair, the way her calf muscles bunched one after the other as she shifted foot to foot. Her face was flushed with the heat of the stove, her brow and neck glistened, and her nose ran as she sniffled and sneezed. All the while her temples throbbed with concentration, for the spaghetti-and-meatball dish was growing ever more complex with each application of the ladle, such that Kato began to sense about it not so much a culinary masterpiece as some arcane mathematical construct, perhaps a topological exploration of the human digestive tract as written in the algebra of hunger.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:49 — 29.1MB)

Excerpt:

“Be quiet,” Kato Whip whispered, realizing how easy it would be to bring everything down. An ominous buzzing came from deeper in the cavern. Motioning for the earthquake to follow, he tiptoed forward to where pale egg cases and mummified remains hung from monstrous webs tenting the walls. The buzzing arose from countless gigantic flies ensnared in the webs. Then he saw it, a large crystal ball suspended above a luminous pool. Clinging to the underside of the crystal, and nearly engulfing it with its long thick legs, was a giant spider.

The tarantula? Of “serpent and tarantula” infamy? The tarantula that, along with the serpent, had laid siege to Lady Dusk’s castle? The tarantula that, according to all, was sinister to a turn?

Whatever, it seemed a pathetic creature. Its integument was devoid of hairs and worn down to the barest luminous yellow membrane, a shadow-play screen upon which the internal organs squirmed and pulsed. Kato squinted hard, glimpsing something else in there, a small figure disturbingly human in form that ran back and forth, back and forth, inside the stomach.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:11 — 32.2MB)

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Excerpt:
“Now, Kato, tell me what I have drawn.”
“A circle and a triangle,” Kato said quickly. For that was indeed all that Sargasson had drawn.
“No quarrel there.” Sargasson tapped the circle. “Point out to me the circle’s corner.”
“Corner?” Kato looked from Sargasson to the circle, wondering if he heard right. “A circle doesn’t have a corner.”
“It did yesterday.”
Kato stared at Sargasson, then at the circle. “No,” he said, disbelieving. After a quick glance up and down the street, Kato knelt and looked closely at the circle. He wanted to say, “No!” more vehemently, but he did not.
Sargasson pointed to the triangle. “What about this?”
“The triangle?” Kato checked the road again, then said with panicky defiance, “Three corners. There, there, and there.” He pointed them out emphatically, then looked anxiously up at Sargasson.
Sargasson gave a comforting nod. “The triangle is fine. That is something we can hold onto.” He brought the hoe down at a point between circle and triangle. “But what of the figure that belongs here — the one with two corners? Draw it for me, Kato.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:58 — 35.7MB)

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Excerpt:
“Name’s Samantha. Yours?”
Deep in the shadowy booth sat a woman. She was middle-aged, with a weathered, hawkish face. Her leathery hands moved deftly, braiding the handle of a new whip.
“Kato,” he said. “Kato Whip.”
“Oh?” She stood up and came forward to rest her well-formed hands on the countertop. “Where’s your whip?”
He watched the sinews jumping in her arms. “I don’t have one.”
Her hawkish eyes narrowed. “With a name like that, you ought to.” She nodded at her merchandise. “Got all kinds. Horse, bull, riding, cat ‘o nine tails, chain, monofilament. You name it, I got it.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:58 — 35.7MB)

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Excerpt:
The grub looked sharply up, at last taking notice of them. Its tiny mouth opened. “Halt! Who goes there! Ahah, two sneaky wayfarers bent on slipping past me. Don’t you know who I am? A Wishmonger Monster, that’s who, sworn to stop all who would travel these woods. That is the purpose of our kind, the creed by which we live — to impede all travel in these Immortal Forests.”
Kato Whip stared at the grub, flabbergasted that it could talk. Would the trees start next?
“I know what you’re thinking,” the grub went on. “‘He’s not so tough. Why, he doesn’t even have any limbs!’ Well, go ahead then. Step right on past me. But first let me ask you a question: Does the word ‘pounce’ mean anything to you?” It wriggled menacingly.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:58 — 35.7MB)