Hello and welcome to the Drabblecast, episode 499.

The Drabblecast is an audio fiction podcast magazine that brings strange stories by strange authors to strange listeners,

such as yourself. I'm your host, Norm Sherman. Great original travel cast story for your folks

this week by Kay Vandal called Nowhere. Kay is a coastal ecologist and weird fiction writer. Her works

appeared and seized the press, dark matter, and anthologies including this world belongs to us

and death's other kingdom, horror tales of World War I. So without further ado, we bring you

Nowhere by K. Vandal.

The Blue Man live where they put John Brown's corpse, which is to say, nowhere.

Nowhere is a cave under Charlestown, West Virginia, which used to be Charlestown, Virginia.

The West Virginians, who presided over John Brown's execution, told the newspapers this.

His corpse would ride to New York with a noose still around his neck, in a wooden box nailed shut,

and the train that carried the coffin whistled to the mothers of the north that this was a preamble to a whole lot more coffins.

Really, the box was empty.

They put the corpse in the cave to feed the blue men.

But the blue men, in nowhere, didn't just eat John Brown's corpse.

They picked it apart and used it for all sorts of things.

His hair became a net for catching scrawny, eyeless fish in the pools of nowhere.

His flesh fertilized fungus gardens, and his bones became tools, and his clothes adorned the kings of nowhere for generations.

I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose, said John Brown before he was

hanged. John Brown's noose, which they did leave round his neck, became six rungs in the

rope ladder to the crack that went up the cave wall, winding toward the surface.

One century after the deposition of that first corpse, the rope ladder made from nooses toward

...