YOU ALWAYS KNOW you’ve hit upon something huge, when the FBI comes knocking on your door. All the best thrillers contain this kind of trope. But how do you tell your closest friends about this secret before the official blokes dressed in black get wind of it? In episode eight of Martyn Le Roux’s serialised podcast tale, Die Soutwaterheks, (The Salt Water Witch), we find Frans (Francois Coertze) facing the terrifying, the impossible and the necessary.

Scary officials who mean business have been knocking on all the doors to the lives of Captain Kearney (Pieter Theron) and Frans himself. They mean business. And they want to know what our friends were doing that night, at that body of water. The ‘we were fishing’ claim doesn’t quite gel.

But what does Belinda (Annette Havenga), Frans’s secretary, think? The story widens in its opportunities for surprise and humour within the framework of this fantasy tale as Frans’s secret is revealed in her fullest, sleeping glory. And it’s a shock on many levels, that shelves any level of scoffing or disbelief.

It’s a show-and-tell or rather a show-and-believe part of the tale that holds up the supernatural in Frans’s bathroom for clear scrutiny. And what do you do with a mythic creature in your house? Therein lies the episode’s cliffhanger.

Die Soutwaterheks has 25 chapters: Watch this space for consecutive reviews, which will appear each Monday, from now on! Recorded and released independently online, in both MP3 and MP4 formats, in Afrikaans with bits of English, this tale, told in individual episodes is accessible through various links. Die Soutwaterheks: Episode 8 Belinda sien die lig (Belinda sees the light) is written by Martyn Le Roux. Directed by Martyn Le Roux, and featuring technical input and sound research by Arné von Molledorf and Martyn Le Roux, and music by Yolanda Strauss and David Muller, it is performed by Francois Coertze, Pieter Theron and Annette Havenga. It is available here.