Blue Horizon
I asked Cicero if he'd ever read a police report like the one given by Sgt. Donoghue:
Like moths to the flame!
And here this evenin’ we had a little moth.
Perhaps she believed she was a butterfly!
But what does it matter?
The flame consumes them all in the end.
This is alone in a furnished room, a stranger among strangers
They look at the flames
The leapin’ yellow flames!
But now it has become the flickerin’ blue light of the gas range.
They look at the light
And it’s so cold and distant!
A chill flame without light and warmth like . . . .
Like life itself, cold and dark.
So they lean forward – and almost without thinkin’ –
They blow out the flame. Now
There alone in the blackness of the night,
When all is silent, except for the gas –
The low, soft, hiss of the gas!
Like the hiss of a snake!
But a kindly snake.
May the Good LORD rest her gentle.
Cicero said he'd never heard such a thing until he listened to Don't Die Without Me, adapted by Sam Dann from O. Henry's A Furnished Room. Some first rate storytelling here, with maxims for writers, such as, make sure the gas is turned off before you go to sleep, that sort of thing. Broadcast January 13, 1977. A good Halloween tale.
What was it with Hiram Brown and the Irish? (What is it with Cicero and the Jewish?) In The_Serpent_of_Saris, Dapper Danny Malloy, a middle-weight boxer who died in Brooklyn in 1930, shares the same dream as Bobby Barlow from Spokane in the 1970s: that of an ancient Mesopotamian god, Seris, who doesn't like white boys. Moral? Don't box with Mespotamians. Unfortunately, the sound quality on this one is poor. I almost culled it, but Fred Gwynne is superb. Earphones work best, so if you use it for family listening, you'll need to beat the children. Broadcast December 4, 1978.
In Reflected_Terror, young Emily Falkirk arrives at Royston 
House after a mysterious speech by the driver of the hansom timwhisky. Wisps and snaggles come to life in the dark, a recurring feature of Gothic tales. And there's lots of dark, as seen through the eyes of a mad woman. Eventually there's raw humping, and a mystery solved. Broadcast February 10, 1978.
In Five Ghostly Indians, our hosts switch from crazy Irish to folks from Maine. In other words, things get far, far worse. Flying sheets and ectoplasm, when Professor Waymouth finds an old Indian arrowhead, he unleashes a regular gale of apparitions. Not much humping, but a sturdy ghost tale. Broadcast October 6, 1975.
Speaking of '75, on June 3, 1975, the night I gave a speech at the Forks High School graduation -- which MDD attended, as a Matriculate -- Mystery Theater broadcast The_Dark_Closet. A villainous Fred Gwynne, an astral Indian, a bad boy and a sexy psychiatrist. If MDD and I had heard this broadcast, we wouldn't have been at the Sportsman's Club, showing folks how to dance.
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