You are listening to a Clarksruled magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarkswood citizens. I hope this podcast finds you very, very well.

Seeing that it is the fourth story of the month and there's not that much news to report,

I'm just going to jump right in.

The story is titled The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness

and is by William Browning Spencer.

Now William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C. and now lives in Austin, Texas.

His first novel, Maybe I'll Call Anna, was published in 1990 and won a New American

writing award, and he has subsequently made quite a reputation for himself with

quirky, eccentric, eclectic novels that dance on the border lines between horror, fantasy, and

black comedy.

His short work has been collected in the return of Count Electric and other stories and the ocean and all of its devices.

So, sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Kiel wore a ragged shirt with the hollow,

Veed there, Simmed that, shimmering on it. She wore it in and out of the virtual. If she was an interactive virtual, the other players sometimes complained, amid the dragons and elves and swords of fire. the her shirt to something suitably medieval could be distracting.

"'Fiz off,' Kiel would say in response to all complaints.

"'Kiel was difficult, rich, self-destructive, beautiful, she was 20 years old and already a case study in virtual psychosis.

She had been rehabbed six times.

She could have died that time on Macor when she went blank in the desert. She still bore the teeth marks of

the land eels that were gnawing on her shoulder when they found her. A close one. You can't

revive the digested. No one had to tell Kiel that she was in

rehab again. She was staring at a green ocean, huge white clouds overhead, white gulls filling the heated air with their cries.

...