PseudoPod

• Author : Tom Reamy
• Narrator : Andrew Leman
• Host : Alex Hofelich
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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“The Detweiler Boy” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1977. Thank you to Vaughne Hansen of the Virginia Kidd Agency for helping us secure the rights to this story.

This episode is dedicated to horror hosts in general, and Sinister Seymour in particular.

The room had been cleaned with pine oil disinfectant and smelled like a public toilet. Harry Spinner was on the floor behind the bed, scrunched down between it and the wall. The almost colorless chenille bedspread had been pulled askew exposing part of the clean, but dingy, sheet. All I could see of Harry was one leg poking over the edge of the bed . He wasn’t wearing a shoe, only a faded brown and tan argyle sock with a hole in it. The sock, long bereft of any elasticity , was crumpled around his thin rusty ankle.

I closed the door quietly behind me and walked around the end of the bed so I could see all of him . He was huddled on his back with his elbows propped up by the wall and the bed. His throat had been cut. The blood hadn’t spread very far. Most of it had been soaked up by the threadbare carpet under the bed . I looked around the grubby little room but didn’t find anything. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of forced entry-but then, my BankAmericard hadn’t left any signs either. The window was open, letting in the muffled roar of traffic on the Boulevard. I stuck my head out and looked , but it was three stories straight down to the neon-lit marquee of the movie house.

It had been nearly two hours since Harry called me. “Bertram, my boy, I’ve run across something very peculiar. I don’t really know what to make of it.”

For the rest of the text of this story, get thee to the closest used book store and pick up a copy of San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories.

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