Pudding Spooks: Giallo Pudding

The rain had the sour, bloody taste of regretted dental procedures, splattering against the rainbow-slicked streets of Milan. Another night, another giallo brewing, though this one with a distinct… flavor. Not the usual spice of psychosexual deviancy, but something far more… unsettling. 

The first victim, a fashion model named, fittingly, Bella Donna, was found in a Fontana-esque pose, “slashed” not with a knife, but with what appeared to be…pudding? Yes, pudding. Not just any pudding, Detective Tetrazzini thought, his trench coat clinging to him like a second skin of despair, but a lurid, quivering mass of unnatural colors – a kind of recombinant DNA gone horribly, gastronomically wrong. 

“Always someone who profits”, Mother would say, but who profits from this?

Tetrazzini, a man whose face seemed permanently etched with the grim poetry of crime scenes, adjusted his fedora, the brim casting his eyes into shadow. He was a detective of singular obsession: all crimes, he believed, were the same crime, all murders merely variations on the primal wound inflicted by his own mother.

Abandonment? Betrayal? A cold bowl of minestrone served with a sneer? It all led back to her. This pudding thing, though… even she couldn’t have concocted this particular brand of madness.

The second model, a waifish blonde named Gioia, met her end in a fashion show, not on the catwalk, but in it. The pudding, somehow animated, had engulfed her, its sugary tendrils strangling the life from her as she strutted the stage. Intense voyeuristic POV camerawork was the only clue to the murderer. The audience, initially mistaking it for some avant-garde performance piece, only realized the horror when Gioia’s eyes bulged, blood vessels bursting like overripe grapes against her porcelain skin. 

The black leather gloves, a giallo calling card, were missing, replaced by… well, nothing. Just the pulsating surface of the pudding itself. 

Tetrazzini shuddered. His mother loathed sweets. Always saying a good bowl of savory stew could fix all.

“It’s all connected, Sergeant,” Tetrazzini rasped, the rain beading on his cigarette. “The first girl, Bella Donna, the name alone…a joke! Like the clowns in the nursing home. And now, Gioia – joy! – extinguished by… pudding. The duality, the contrast! It’s all a message. She is speaking.” 

He looked over the police tape with intensity, trying to make sense of the carnage. The set, usually a stylish visual assaulted his senses now. He scanned the scene, the instruments glinting under the camera flashbulbs.

The lab reports were no help. The pudding was unlike anything they’d seen, a bizarre concoction of recombinant DNA, suggesting origins both organic and…otherworldly. Fragments of cow, traces of slime mold, and a disturbing amount of human genetic material were intermixed. The work of a mad scientist, or something far more insidious, darker?

“This isn’t food, Tetrazzini,” the medical examiner, a jaded man named Pasolini, said, his voice muffled by his mask. “This is a statement. A truly giallo vision.”

Tetrazzini ignored him, lost in his own mental labyrinth. His mother had always warned him about scientists with their “fake knowledge.”

Then, a breakthrough. A witness, a stagehand with a nervous tic and a penchant for conspiracy theories, claimed to have seen someone tampering with the dessert cart backstage–a figure cloaked in shadow, their face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat – a fedora, like Tetrazzini’s own. In their hands, a syringe filled with a viscous, luminescent green liquid. 

Another ingredient for the pudding? Or something…more? The description triggered something in the detective’s subconscious, it felt just like the green goo Mother had forbidden him from eating as a boy.

The trail led to a secluded laboratory on the outskirts of the city, a place where gene splicing and questionable ethics danced a macabre tango. Inside, amidst beakers and bubbling vats, Tetrazzini found her. Not his actual mother, of course, but a fashion designer, once famous, now fallen into obscurity, her mind twisted by resentment and a god complex. She saw the models not as beautiful, middle-class women, but as abominations needing correction . Using recombinant DNA, she was fashioning a “new era” of humanity: one without flesh, without beauty, without choice. Her canvas? Pudding.

“They were obscene,” she shrieked, her voice cracking like shattered glass. “Parading their beauty, their youth! It was all a lie!”

Tetrazzini finally saw the truth. It wasn’t just his mother; it was all mothers, all creators, all those who dared to mold and shape, to play God with the clay of human existence. The designer, driven mad by a twisted desire for control, was merely a vessel for that primal rage. The killer was inside her the whole time.

He had been waiting for this.

As the police sirens wailed in the distance, Tetrazzini stared into the designer’s eyes, seeing not madness, but a reflection of his own fractured soul. He knew that the pudding killer was apprehended, but it would not be the end. He would keep searching for the truth, even if that meant chasing the ghost of his mother through the neon-soaked labyrinth of his own mind. For in the world of Giallo, some wounds never truly heal; they only fester, waiting for the next downpour of rust and regret. 

“There is no such thing as closure,” Mother would say, “only endless searching.” And he would always search.

He pulled up his coat collar to face whatever darkness came next.

Author Judge Santiago Burdon tells tales displaying his charismatic personality with a sincere simplicity, with intelligence, wisdom, and satirical humour that few possess with pen to paper. “ARCHITECT OF HAVOC” brought me to tears of sadness and tears of laughter at various instances throughout the short stories within these pages because Judge knows how to conduct a symphony of emotions as he tugs at your heartstrings.

Whilst reading, you will be brought to moments of disbelief, questioning the authenticity of Santiago’s memories, of empathy and compassion for the heartbreaking journey of the life of a ‘storyteller,’ and most certainly, Burdon’s words will entice and evoke your memories of tragedy and hardship as well as those of joy and happiness.

So, if you are in search of depth, truth, and wisdom, then “ARCHITECT OF HAVOC” is a must-read, as Judge softens the blows of immeasurable pain, showing the vicissitudes of life that within time, bring us to our sense of self, enabling acceptance not only of the self but of others too whose life choices may not conform to traditional ‘societal norms’ and who many a time find themselves marginilised. It is this tolerance and acceptance, so beautifully depicted, that subtly implies how a troubled past enables the transformation of an author who is the brilliant mind behind his everlasting words and the actions of his great love, and for me, especially as a father, as read within these stories of his love for his children.

Do yourself a favour, BUY THIS BOOK. It is the balm for any wounded heart, any isolated person that you may find both healing and come to know that you are not alone, that you were never alone…

— Noora Salaam, CEO, Founder & Publisher of Writing EDEN

BUY A COPY HERE

Lady Evil: A Fucked-Up Fairy Tale

Princess Cherrypop, whose heart yearned for a vanilla prince and a world scrubbed clean of kink, found herself adrift not on a River of Sparkling Goodness but in a sea of churning biomechanics. The kingdom of Euphoria, once a pastel dreamscape, was now infested with the oily dread of H.R. Giger’s nightmares. Towering, interconnected machines pulsed with a cold, unfeeling life, their surfaces slick with a substance that might have been lubricant or something far more sinister. The air thrummed with the bass of Black Sabbath, not the operatic wail of desire, but the grinding dread of “Lady Evil,” a song that spoke of a place where the wind wouldn’t blow and whispers carried only of impending doom. What fresh hell, as Dorothy Parker might say.

Cherrypop, accustomed to tiaras and tasteful gummies, found herself repulsed. The candy floss clouds had curdled into grotesque parodies, shaped like engorged veins and throbbing organs. Even Mimsywroth, her beloved cat, had undergone a disturbing transformation, its fur replaced with interlocking plates of chitinous armor, its purr a mechanical whir. “Oh, Twatzapooner,” she whimpered, “where is the charm, the glamour, the good taste?”

The source of this biomechanical plague, of course, was Baroness Cuntingham, Queen of Nair. A figure of pure, weaponized perversity, Cuntingham had embraced the Gigeresque aesthetic with unsettling zeal. Her castle, once a monument to bad taste and aggressive pastels, was now a sprawling fusion of flesh and machine, a cathedral of the perverse where the very walls seemed to writhe with a life of their own. She aimed to graft this aesthetic of literal fucking horror, sleaze and trash onto all of Euphoria, a total re-brand, if you will. Cuntingham, in her own way, sought a twisted form of liberation, a world where desire, no matter how deviant, reigned supreme. But Cherrypop, clinging to her saccharine vision, stood in her way.

One might argue, of course, that Cuntingham’s vision was simply a reflection of the world’s inherent darkness, a necessary plunge into the grotesque to confront the anxieties of a hyper-technological age. As Alex S. Johnson might say, “Sometimes you have to look into the abyss, even if the abyss is wearing nipple clamps.” But Cherrypop was no philosopher; she simply wanted her prince and her pastel ponies, dammit!

Cuntingham, ever the strategist, extended an offer. “Join me, Cherrypop,” she boomed, her voice a synthesized rasp emanating from a throat laced with chrome. “Embrace the biomechanical, the perverse, the real! Together, we shall rule Euphoria, not as queens of saccharine delusion, but as goddesses of glorious, twisted desire!” 

Cherrypop recoiled. The thought of abandoning her pastel fantasies for Cuntingham’s world of living metal and throbbing flesh was anathema. Yet, a seed of doubt had been planted. Was her vision of perfection merely a gilded cage, a denial of the darker urges that simmered beneath the surface of every heart, even her own? One could argue that repression breeds a far more insidious form of horror than any overt display of sleaze. Still, even the most compelling argument couldn’t mask the image of the chintz.

Twatzapooner herself materialized, no longer the goddess of fluff and glitter, but a being of cold, hard light, her features sharp and unforgiving. “Cherrypop,” she intoned, her voice echoing with celestial judgment, “your purity is your strength. Resist the Baroness’s embrace, and Euphoria shall be cleansed!” 

Yet, the cost of this purity was steep. As Cherrypop rejected Cuntingham’s offer, the Baroness unleashed her biomechanical horrors. Mimsywroth, now a grotesque fusion of feline and machine, turned on her mistress, its mechanical claws dripping with a viscous, black ichor. The candy floss sky wept acid rain, dissolving the remaining vestiges of Cherrypop’s pastel paradise. Perhaps, Cherrypop mused as she dodged a scuttling, spider-like automaton, a touch of sleaze would have been preferable to this.

In the end, it was not purity or perversion that saved Cherrypop, but a bizarre fusion of the two. Recalling a half-remembered ritual from a dusty grimoire, Cherrypop embraced the biomechanical horrors, not with adoration, but with a detached, clinical curiosity. She saw the beauty, the artistry, even the humor in Cuntingham’s twisted creations. She saw that even the most nightmarish landscape could hold a strange, compelling grace.

Using this newfound understanding, Cherrypop reprogrammed the automatons, turning them against Cuntingham. Mimsywroth, freed from its biomechanical shackles, reverted to its fluffy, purring self. The acid rain ceased, replaced by a gentle shower of glittery oil that nourished the land, creating a landscape that was both beautiful and bizarre, a fusion of Cherrypop’s saccharine dreams and Cuntingham’s biomechanical nightmares. Euphoria was saved, not by a prince, but by a princess who dared to embrace the sleaze and trash within herself.

Perhaps, as Black Sabbath suggested, there was a “Lady Evil” in us all. Perhaps, as Alex S. Johnson implied, it is only by confronting that darkness that we can hope to find a glimmer of something truly beautiful. Perhaps, after all, a little kink never hurt anyone. Unless, of course, it involves rusty surgical instruments.