 Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Retro Radio, old-time radio in the dark, presented by Weird Darkness. Each week I bring you a show from the golden age of radio, but still in the genre of Weird Darkness. I'll have stories of the macabre and horror, mysteries and crime, and even some dark science fiction. If you're new here, welcome to the show, and be sure to subscribe or follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Spreading the word about the show helps it to grow. If you're here because you're already a fan of nostalgic audio and print, you'll want to email WeirdDarkness at RadioArchives.com. When you do that, you'll get an instant reply with links to download full-length pulp audio books, pulp e-books and old-time radio shows for free. That's WeirdDarkness at RadioArchives.com. Coming up, it's an episode from The Black Mass. The Black Mass is one of those strange treasures of old-time radio. The program came at the very end of the golden age of radio era, produced between 1963 and 1964. Most of the programs that were used to hearing from old-time radio were from the commercial networks, and their ultimate purpose was to make money for the networks and the sponsors. The Black Mass was a production of KPFA Berkeley and the Pacifica Network. Pacifica was the first listener-supported radio network in the U.S. Because the Pacifica Network is listener-funded, the staff feels obligated to provide the best programming possible for the audience without commercial consideration. Then this leads to very artful programming. Pacifica was founded in 1946 by a pacifist Louis Hill dedicated to the preservation of free speech and the advocacy of controversial programming. Sadly, some time after it went on the air, the network became more notorious for its liberal political stances than noteworthy for its quality programming. KPFA drama and literature director Jack Nestle came up with the concept for The Black Mass and suggested it to Eric Bowersfield, professor of aesthetics and philosophy at the California School of Fine Arts. Bowersfeld was already reading classics and modern literature over the air and was not immediately enthusiastic about the Black Mass concept. The idea of seeking out tales of the supernatural from authors who were not widely known for writing in that genre eventually won him over. The production was exceptionally well done, with relatively primitive for-the-time technology. Bowersfeld first adapted the stories as radio plays, adapting them to a workable length and creating dialogue in a dramatic form. KPFA production director John Whiting would record Bowersfield, sometimes assisted by other actors, reading scripts and Bowersfield then took the tapes for editing. After editing the pair would secure what studio time they could, painstakingly adding music and effects to the voice track. Because they did not have access to multi-track recording equipment at the time, this process could run very late into the night. The result deserves a place among the best of late night horror radio shows. Tonight it is an episode from January 18, 1964. Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness as we listen to the Black Mass and Nightmare. That element of derisive cruelty is common too. Quite ordinarily pleasant people indulge in it, though they certainly deny it. But I know, I've experienced it. There's no mistaking the breadth of malevolence. It becomes audible and visible as you grow older. And there comes a time when you perceive it as an aura. Someone at a party will turn from a conversation and you will believe that the sneer on his lips is for you. Or you will hear your names spoken by total strangers in a theatre for you. A footstep will sound in the night below your bedroom window. A curtain will twitch as you pass the house of supposed friends. And a hand, surreptitious beneath the table, will prepare a few grains to be slipped into your drink. You see it builds up, it builds up. The intent of malice lies everywhere. One's nearest and dearest are most culpable because, of course, they know one's fears thoroughly. And they always have the advantage of being able to be quite convincing about acting for your own good. They have explanations on hand for everything. But after a time, you see that each is more suspect than the last. And in the end they become curiously misted as physical figures. And their voices drawn now in unrecognizable terms that have only the connotations of evil. They have merged into a nightmare backpaw, and only the aura of malevolence is recognizable. Horses, shadows, sniggering laughter, pursuit. These are the elements of persecution. And all you have to balance them is a bit of longing for revenge on your persecutors. Revenge which you are quite unable to implement because of your natural timidity. That then was how it was with me. I was slowly edging forward over the borderline of insanity. I did not go out, but it came to the point where it was not sufficient to lock my door. They would get in. They would get in somehow. Barricades were useless. Indeed they proved so. For finally I was taken, taken, cringing in a corner of the room that was my last retreat from the world. Of that actual day I remember nothing clearly. No doubt the details were unpleasant. They could hardly be otherwise. But they are unimportant. What is important is that I then met Dr Fraser. We understood each other. You are absolutely safe here. You must believe you are absolutely safe here. It was the same phrase many others had falsely used to me. But I knew that this time it was true. There was no need even for him to demonstrate security by leaving the door open or giving me permission to investigate the room for hidden contrivances. True I crept furtively about touching the bare walls and turning sharply to surprise the shadow that I had come to expect to be creeping upon me. But there were no shadows. And I smiled a bit shame-facedly at Dr Fraser as he sat at his desk. Well, is everything all right? He stood up and shook hands with me. It was a gesture of friendship, not a greeting or farewell. We were much of a height, both tall and lean. Though at that time my constant fears had given a twist to my neck and shoulders that had stamped me with the slightly obscene horror of all those who believe they are hunted, while Dr Fraser was tranquil, aquiline, dignified. But I felt none of the customary inferiority, even when he looked down at my hand held briefly in his own, and saw the swollen and ragged cuticles where for years I had picked and bitten at them in an habitual reaction to my fears. Oh, such finely shaped hands. We must make them better. We must make them better. He was with me, you see. From the first, he understood all my difficulties. And although at that first meeting he didn't even begin the work of release, he gained my confidence. Of course I had my own quarters in the home, and a very comfortable suite it was. And I was absolutely free to come and go as I wished, but I preferred not to go beyond the walls surrounding the grounds. For some time I just wanted to enjoy my new found safety, and in any case it would have seemed ungrateful to want to go beyond the walls that contained the pleasant and extensive park, almost as if I wanted to escape from escape. As for the cure, I can tell you little of that. Every morning Dr Fraser and I used to talk. That was the heart of it. I would tell him things, almost whatever he asked. Sometimes not. Then he would say, well, shall we enjoy a light sleep? Calm, we'll enjoy a light sleep. A light sleep. And after that, it would seem as if I told him what he wanted to know. Even though I couldn't actually remember doing so. You see, it was as easy as that. Just lie down on that perfectly comfortable sofa and answer Dr Fraser's questions, which were always put in such a way that they scarcely seemed like questions at all, but more like ordinary to and fro conversation really. He never seemed to be prying. He was just interested, man to man. Then peace. Gradually, but suddenly all my anguish disappeared. I had no fears of any kind. Well now, look at yourself in the glass. And when I looked, I saw that my shoulders had become noticeably less hunched because now I was no longer constantly looking behind me and my eyes no longer had the terrible shiftiness of eyes trying to follow the movements of ubiquitous enemies. My, my hands too had begun to heal up. At first I sat on them while Dr Fraser and I were talking, but after a time he made me look at them steadily and I found I could do so without revulsion. As he said, it was all a matter of facing up to things. You see, it's all a matter of facing up to things. And now you can do that. But stay a few weeks longer. Go out and about, get used to things in your own time. Many as a cure has been spoiled by too sudden a transition. I really am cured. Tell me I really am cured, Dr Fraser. Tell me I really am cured. You really are cured. You really are. You really are. You can imagine my delight on entering my new life, free of envious whispering and disjointed implications of torture. I went about with what must have appeared to be a very childlike gaiety, though in that place innocence and experience were frighteningly and terribly combined. But since cured or not, all of us there looked inward upon ourselves rather than outward at our companions. No one remarked as extraordinary my newfound happiness. Happiness. I speak of it as that. And you would think that for one just released from the persecution of a world of enemies, unable to seek love instead of enmity in people, there would be unlimited vistas of joy. But in my case, it was not like that. Indeed no. The first time I realized this was on the third day after Dr Fraser had given me my pass into a world free of enemies. I felt as I can only suppose any normal man would feel if he had just recovered from a long illness and been granted a new lease on life. All the colors, sounds and smells of the world were intense and clear. People were just people I could talk with them, if I wished. Enjoy the normal intercourse of civilization. I walked down the hill to the village, faintly astonished by my newfound daring. I went straight into the public bar of an inn, reminding myself that before I met Dr Fraser nothing would have driven me into a room where people were gathered. I would have distorted them into vicious enemies, their derision misting the air and their secret laughter droning like voices heard in a sick sleep. In the pub, I nodded cheerfully, but not too deliberately to the company and ordered a ginger beer shandy. The buzz of conversation stopped for a moment. I crossed one angle over the other and leaned against the bar. My drink came and as I paid I heard a man who was sitting at one of the small tables say to his woman companion, he may be skinny, but he's a devil for strong drink. It was an unfunny remark and meant only to impress the woman. I accepted it as such. There wasn't a flicker of resentment in me, even when I heard the woman snickering. And no resentment, no horror. I had been momentarily in the presence of real, not imagined, derision and it had left me unmoved. Perhaps even a little disappointed. Fraser had almost one might have said given me a completely new personality. And calmly I left the pub. My nod of farewell, including the man who had marked me and walked back up the hill. Seeing myself in my mind's eye as the poor haunted creature I had been, I smiled with easy self contempt as I imagined myself running, running, running my breath gasping pursued wherever I went by that baleful evil with which all my tormentors had been invested. It was amusing to consider that for so long I had in a way been sustained as a cancerous sustained by the malevolence I had created for myself. Now there were no shadows, no baleful voices, lasting happiness. One would have thought, but strangely in a little while I found that lacking the sustaining power of torment I was so to speak starved. Starved. Starved. I needed the torture of persecution to feed me. Now I had nothing. This realization was built up over many weeks. I began to seek persecution with the same intensity I had fled from it. I dressed and acted eccentrically in the village wearing an old fashioned, invinous cape, laughing and talking to myself and in general an inviting comment. But I realized all too clearly that the surreptitious remarks people made about me were impelled by humor and compassion rather than derision. There was no malice in them. A doctor Fraser was of course delighted with my progress. He saw that now I ventured into every lion's den. I didn't tell him that my venturings had become desperate searches for the sustenance of torment. I had begun to feel stirrings of resentment towards him, towards doctor Fraser. For it was he who had brought about my growing despair. But being in many ways a weak man and in every way a timid one. I couldn't find the kind of courage that was needed to tell him of my resentment. Such courage as I possessed was needed to face the emptiness of my tranquil life. Then at the end of autumn a thin, bitter malice once more attacked and persecuted me. This time, this time it was in the form of a nightmare. In the dream there was an intense heat and light surrounding me. A kind of sunshine in which you're forced to screw up the eyes to avoid being blinded. But in the centre of all that light was an oasis of shadows. Columns. And among the shadows a figure stood, cloaked and still. Watching me, watching, watching I say but that isn't quite accurate for when the figure moved a little, a turn only. I knew that it had no face. It wasn't, I hasten to say, a gothic facelessness, a ghastly impression of shredded flesh or glaring eye sockets or mangled bones. I might have felt my scalp prickle. I might have even been fatally amused or disgusted by such a dreamdition. But this was a subtle refinement of facelessness. Void. Even though it was expressed by neither eye nor mouth was nonetheless clearly malevolent. The malevolence of ass was put up there. It seemed in fact the very void from which malice might have been created. In the dream I felt very clearly that my search for the sustenance of torment was over. I screamed, of course, but the scream was at once aborted in that special dream atmosphere where a fungoid oppressiveness and escape was equally impossible. I felt quite certain that it was no single visitation of horror. It would recur again and again, like a new lease of torment. I proved myself right in my apprehension. It was a recurring nightmare. Night after night. I found myself within the confines of that sun that pearl you with its heart of darkness. Night after night the faceless figure turned all the intensity of its darkly burning malice upon me. I say night after night, but that isn't strictly true. Even I, with so many years of persecution behind me, could not have borne that. The nightmare was frequent though, and it was, in a curious way, a progressive. I mean that the blinding, stifling light and heat that formed its atmosphere and in which I found myself trapped or pressed, immobile, diminished somewhat in intensity with each recurrence. I wasn't aware of this until I had dreamed the nightmare many times, but at last I realized that there seemed also to be an increasing clarity about my cloaked and hooded tormentor, almost a promise of revelation. Still no eyes looked out, and not even the thinnest of lips were folded back from the vicious breath of malice. In fact, my familiar's malevolence remained bitterly inscrutable, even though I gained, as you shall see, a hint of this identity. But nonetheless, there was a definite feeling of progression, either towards revelation of my tormentor's identity or disaster or both. I could not be sure. But a gathering excitement attended my recurrent visits to the benighted hospital of my nightmare. Outwardly, the effect on me was appalling. I was rapidly falling back to the state that had brought me to Dr. Fraser. Oh, this will never do. This will never do it all. You must tell me what has happened. I can't have a triumph turning into a failure. I cowered back in my chair, biting the skin around my fingernails. I would say nothing. He rose from his desk and came towards me. I whimpered, backing away into the corner. Please, aren't we friends? We're all friends. Ah, hallucination. It's a dream you've been having. You must tell me all about it. I could feel my mouth quivering with fear and frustration. With all my heart, I wanted to reveal my nightmare to him. Yet to me, the loss of its defilement would be like the draining away of life. I had already experienced the emptiness of tranquility. I had enough cunning to be careful. I calmed myself. I calmed myself down. I was very careful. Stop that giggling. I hadn't realised I was laughing. I felt humiliation burning through me like fire. Now, you have only to tell me your dream. You know you can trust me. Didn't I exercise your fears before? I can again even in a dream. No, no, I don't dream ever. I never dream. I never dream. Then you're the only man in the world who doesn't. Some dreams are remembered, some not. That is all. I don't remember. I don't remember anything. I don't remember anything. All right. Today you won't remember. Tomorrow perhaps. We shall see. I can assure you I'll have your dream from you sooner or later. Now, sleep. You'd like a little something to help you to sleep? No, no. The thought of the malevolent persecutor of my dream was more than I could bear. I moved onwards through time towards night and sleep was a fascination combining horror and lust. If my assignation with my familiar was cancelled out by a dreamless slumber, I endured the interval between that night and the next with a relief which paradoxically I found almost unendurable. The persecution that was destroying me had become a necessity. For several days, Dr. Fraser tried to prize my nightmare from me by gentle encouragement, but his persistence was unavailing. I had too much to lose. He had robbed me of one source of existence I didn't intend that he should steal the other one from me. My resentment towards him grew. I longed for revenge upon him for cornering me as he had. After all, who else could I blame? But as I have hinted before, I am not the sort to plan or execute overt reckoning. Secret. The introverted vindictiveness, though, is another matter. Well, if I can take your nightmare from you by request, I shall have it by extortion. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning we will try a little sleep. I wanted to shout out in frenzied rage when I covered my trembling mouth with my head. Quiet now. Quiet. Quiet. I could feel his eyes burning into my back as he had me led back to my room. That was yesterday. Last night. Last night I dreamed again. But with a subtle difference. The blinding light and scorching heat had diminished and been replaced by a thin, sweating chill. And it was into this that I ended the nightmare. My familiar watched me, shadowed, anonymous, hooded, and ubiquitous in the sense that when I forced myself to shut out his sinister faceless malevolence, I found the cloaked, silent figure still watching me, full of a malicious surprise that I should have been so naive as to seek escape by a mere closing of the eyes. For the nightmare went endlessly tunneling inwards through countless reflections of eyes reflected in eyes, reflected in eyes. And this time I experienced also a strange duality. Now, I seemed to have been drawn into a dreadful impersonation of my watching tormentor so that I was myself looking outwards facelessly from the shadowed hood and observing with immense glee the surprised horror of the tall lean figure which chokingly screamed and closed its eyes, a ridiculous abort of attempt to escape the malignant I I embraced him with. The recognition of myself as a creature eaten by malevolent persecution, yet at the same time triumphantly and vindictively projecting malevolence outwards, should have been more than I was capable of bearing, that I knew a wholly lustful orgasm of satisfaction in that moment of recognition, vindictiveness of a secret kind is, as I have said, easier than overt revenge. I awoke, I felt as if I had experienced some strange metamorphosis, and I looked at myself in the glass, and no change there. My head was still hunched on my shoulders in the familiar attitude of the persecuted. My eyes were shifted with fear, yet I felt calm. Not calm in the way I had felt when Dr. Frazier had released my previous fears from me, but rather calm, calm with the satisfaction of achievement. I laughed to myself and rubbed my hands pleasurably together. They sounded unusually dry and papery when I knocked at Dr. Frazier's door. There was no answer. I knew she was inside though. My push the door silently opened. Dr. Frazier was at his desk. The room was filled with sunshine. The cold pale sunshine of a winter morning. A thin nightmare chill was with us. Dr. Frazier looked up. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He too had suffered a metamorphosis. He was not as yet a creature completely derided by terror, but the silent erosion of fear and malice within his skull had begun. The horror of this realization was clearly upon him, his lips and fingers trembled. His eyes looked wearily out from beneath his fine brows. He could see my own warily hooded, watching him, and his in mine endlessly reflected back and forth. For God's sake, what is going to happen now? What is going to happen now? I did not answer him. I was very well aware that he sought the comfort of my assurance. Why? Surely you're going to exercise my dream, doctor. Isn't that what I'm here for? A long and necessary for him to discover my dream. He already knew it. No was it necessary for him to tell me that last night he had experienced the first long nightmare of persecution, in which the lean, coked, faceless figure stood watching him. Just as I watched him now malevolent and sinister, and I would always be with him, I would always be with him. Thanks for listening to Retro Radio, Old Time Radio in the Dark. If you haven't done so yet, be sure to subscribe or follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. And if you like the show, please share it with someone you know who also loves Old Time Radio and Pulp Audio. If you want to hear even more, drop an email to WeirdDarkness at RadioArchives.com and get an instant reply with links to download full-length Pulp Audio books, Pulp Ebooks and Old Time Radio shows absolutely free. That's WeirdDarkness at RadioArchives.com. I'm Darren Marlar. I'll see you next time for Retro Radio, Old Time Radio in the Dark.