In this our ninth season, welcome to the latest episode of our current Tale for Our Time. If you hop over to our timely Tales home page, you'll find it displayed in Netflix tile style, with the stories organised by category - thrillers, fantasy, romance, etc - which we hope will make it easier for you to find your favorite serial. If it doesn't, please let us know. But you can now access seventy-two of our cracking yarns here - and all previous episodes of our current adventure, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, here.

And with that welcome to Part Eleven of our tale. In tonight's installment, our protagonist discovers that what he had taken to be rather lumpy decorative finials on Mr Kurtz's fence posts are in fact something other:

I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think.

Decapitation was unusual to a European of the early twentieth century. From Val-d'Oise to Sligo, Amsterdam to Woolwich, it is more familiar in today's Christendom. Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Eleven of Heart of Darkness simply by clicking here and logging-in.

If you've yet to hear any of our Tales for Our Time, you can do so by joining The Mark Steyn Club and enjoy our nightly audio adventures every evening twenty minutes before lowering your lamp - or hoard the episodes and binge-listen at the weekend or on a long car journey. For more details on that and other benefits to Steyn Club membership in this ninth year, see here - and don't forget our special Gift Membership.