The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast #1

Episode Date: June 13, 2011

Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Nosleep Podcast! Featuring stories from the No Sleep forum at Reddit.com, these stories will send a shiver down your spine while the dark night hours beckon you to try to sleep. Our first podcast features two stories: The Stairs and the Doorway written by Eric Dodd (Redditor Unxmaal) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone) The Midnight Man written by V. Rusanovsky (Redditor VermilionSky) and read by Alex Beal (Redditor Alexthehoopy). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the dark hours when you dare not close your eyes, No sleep. It's the No Sleep podcast. No Sleep. Featuring stories from Reddit.com's No Sleep Forum. Join us as the sleepless hours tick past. Our first tale is entitled The Stairs and the Doorway, written by Eric Dodd and read by David Cummings.

I don't feel like I'm a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the backyard just to see what was in the crow's nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the backyard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under the house and I wanted to see it. To see. My folks aren't dirt poor, but they're pretty close. They're part of that missing middle of America, the people who work 40 hours a week until they die, with no savings to speak of.

I got my first job at a horse stable when I was 14. It didn't last very long. I knew I needed to get a job because I knew we needed the money, so I bounced around for the next few years, washing dishes, waiting tables, until I graduated high school. Pop was really tough on me about college. He never went, nobody in his family had, so there were a few fights about where I would go after school. It was a huge shock to me when, just after graduation, he drove me down to the uni. He'd been classmates with the dean, and they'd come up with an arrangement where I'd get a full scholarship, provided I made good grades, and worked for the university.

I never felt like a scholar. In high school, I kept my head down and did enough to get it. get by, pulling off bees and a few C's. I wasn't interested in learning because learning wasn't interesting. Uni was different. I took mainly core classes, math, English, history and science, but they were fascinating. For one thing, nobody cared if I showed up or not. It was entirely up to me to succeed, so I did. In exchange for my education, I worked security and did some light maintenance duties. Maintenance was a no-brainer. I've always been handy, and most of the fix-it jobs were the type that could be solved with a liberal application of WD-40, or elbow grease, or both. Security was a

different story. Security gave me superpowers. The job itself was pretty easy. I got a uniform, a badge, a flashlight, and Ma gave me some keychain mace for my birthday. No, I didn't get a gun, they weren't allowed on campus anyway. I worked mostly nights and weekends and doubles during long holiday breaks. I was to walk around the full campus twice in a night, checking the labs, computer center, and library. The rest of my time was pretty much my own. There were two other guards, Jake and Al, but they worked different shifts from me. We had overlap nights on Wednesday nights, where we'd get together for about an hour to discuss any major events or changes. There might have been some beer at those meetings, but I'm underage, so you can't prove anything.

Jake worked mostly day shift and Al worked swings and some overnights during the week. Jake was a younger guy, training to be on the local police force, so he took his job pretty seriously. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Al mostly slept during his shifts. Al was two years older than dirt, so he deserved the rest. Remember that bit about superpowers? My first night on the job, Al gave me a huge keychain with about a thousand keys on it. It weighed nearly five pounds and was secured to my belt with a heavy-duty metal chain. Don't lose that keychain, kid, Al said.

You got the keys to the kingdom right there. Any door that don't open, you don't want to go in it. My work hobby, the thing that kept me awake on those long, cold winter break nights, was exploring. I made it a point every night to open some door that I'd never opened before. I started in the new section where the library and the computer center were, opening each room, each closet, making a map in my head of where everything was. Some nights I might explore two or three rooms. Some nights I might not have time for anything more than an odd, out-of-the-way broom closet.

The uni is actually a pretty large campus for having a full student body of only 12 or 1300. It was built as a Methodist College in 1896 and became state-owned in the 30s. There were three main sections, the old school housed the administration offices and a few unlucky classrooms, unlucky due to the lack of central heat and air, and the three-story building had no elevators. The labs were a brutalist horror of poured concrete slabs and tiny windows, built back in the 70s when buildings that looked like Soviet radiators were in style. The new library was steadily losing its new, built in the late 90s boom and made in that unique red brick and glass style like everything else during those years. When I think back to those early days, those days before, I think how stupid I was. How naive.

I should have thought about winter. I should have thought about the solstice. By December of my sophomore year of college, I had cleared every room in the new library. I had opened every door, checked every closet, and had a good mental map of the whole building. It was, ultimately, pretty unimpressive. I found no buried treasure, no secret stash of missing computer supplies cashed in a forgotten closet. I did find a small sweaty stack of bad porno mags in a supply closet in the basement level. Wicked, wicked cowgirls! Who was I to judge?

December is a slow time for the uni. After the mad rush of finals, the campus was suddenly deserted. The remaining few staff seemed lost. The building stood silent and dark in the thin winter breezes. We had a steady series of snowstorms, but, none bad enough to close the campus. I made sure the sidewalks were clear and the entryways salted and otherwise tried to stay indoors. Besides, I had the old school to explore. The main old school building, Downing Hall, was a four-story V-shaped building. It had no elevators,

tiny stairwells, and was only exempted from ADA compliance due to its historical importance. It had no air conditioning, save for some sporadic window-mount units that were only permitted to be installed on the rear of the building, so as not to spoil the building's historic charm. The building's heat came from a massive, ancient boiler in the basement. As far as I knew, Al was the only person who knew anything about the boiler, and he must have kept it in good shape because I never heard any complaints about it. I spent the second week after finals week poking through the top floors of Downing Hall. I didn't have a lot of time for exploring every night, as the snow gave me more than usual upkeep chores, but I made steady progress. I discovered a small

room in the attic on the left wing that must have been an old dean's office, complete with a beautiful antique desk and wardrobe. I check both, thinking that I might find something historic to give to the dean, but the wardrobe was empty, save for a moth-eaten wool scarf, and the desk contents were limited to a few old newspapers and some tax forms from the 1950s. A level below on the building's fourth floor, I found two dozen small empty classrooms. In my handyman's mindset, I checked the windows for loose glass panes and for water or rodent damage. I fully expected to see rat droppings, or at least some insect damage, but I found none. The second and third floors were much the same, except the rooms on the room's

on the rear of the building were air condition and thus actively used for classes when the school was in session. The main floor was administration and included the dean's office. I thought it wise not to snoop around in my boss's office or in payroll, so I skipped a lot of these rooms. I made my way to the stairwell, to the basement, used my superhero keychain, opened the heavy door, and went down. The basement of Downing Hall was different from that of the new library. For one thing, it was a lot more cramped. The hallway was narrow and the ceiling was low, with doorways leading off at regular intervals.

I checked every room, flipping the old two-button switches to on, using my flashlight in the dark corners. I had carried a few packs of spare light bulbs, the fancy new CFC bulbs, in my satchel, thinking to replace any that had burned out. and save the environment while I was at it. The little rooms mostly contained junk, spare desks, filing cabinets full of 40 and 50-year-old papers, old holiday decorations, and so forth, lit by naked hanging bulbs. I'm not an imaginative kind of guy.

I guess I'm pretty smart. I'd made straight A's in my college courses. It never occurred to me to be scared. I didn't think, I'm alone in a creepy old basement. This was my place, my job, my hobby, and it all seemed so normal. By the night of the 20th of December, I had made my way to the boiler room. The furnace was a massive monstrosity of iron and rivets, pipes and gauges.

It was hellishly hot in that room and equally loud. It was, however, neat and very clean. Al kept it that way because he said, A clean boiler lets you get more shut-eye. The furnace had been converted from coal to gas at some point, but the soot had stained the walls of the room and the old coal chute still opened in one of the corners. I had no intention of giving the boiler room more than a glance.

I'd been there dozens of times and there was nothing to see, just a workbench and the furnace itself. When I noticed a small door to the back and left, behind the furnace. That's weird, I thought to myself. I had never seen that door before, but then again I had never stood in that particular spot, beside the workbench, and I had never really looked.

The door was smaller than a normal door, maybe five feet tall, painted in the same non-color, drab, gray-brown of the walls, and was made of metal, just like the other doors in the basement. I went over to the door and touched the handle. I think the body knows sometimes when things are wrong. Have you ever had that feeling like you're being watched?

When you know you're totally alone and nobody can see you, but you feel eyes on you? Have you ever gone left instead of right? Because you got a feeling that you just shouldn't go to the right today. It didn't work that way for me. When I touched that doorknob, nothing felt any different. My head didn't hurt, my neck hairs didn't stand up, and I didn't hear an inner voice saying, Don't do it.

The doorknob turned, but the door wouldn't open. I looked more closely and saw a small keyhole. I checked my magic keychain and found three possible matches. Struck out on the first two, and the third worked, of course. The hinges squealed like they hadn't been used in a long time. Decades. My handyman instincts noted it. WD40, I mumbled.

I hauled open the door and stepped through into another small, cramped hallway. The light switch worked, and the single bulb blew with a crack. Damn it. My hackles did raise then. I flicked on my flashlight and quickly swapped out the hallway bulb with a new one. I looked around and saw this hallway was narrow, straight, and ended a few yards away at another door. That door opened easily, onto another stairway. What the hell? I said.

Nobody had ever mentioned a sub-basement for this building. The hairs on the back of my neck were still standing out. I shook it off as nerves from the blown bulb and walked to the stairwell. It was a standard stairwell and looked pretty much the same as the others in the building. I walked to the bottom and met another door. I pushed through it to see another long, narrow hallway, with doors leading off to either side at regular intervals. The first door to my left was on the first door to my left was on the door.

unlocked, and opened fairly easily onto a storage closet. There were stacks of late 60s-era books, a few desks, and a decaying mop in its bucket. The door across from it was unlocked, but did not open so easily. I hauled the door open to find a larger room that looked to have been used as a classroom. There were desks, a blackboard, anatomical diagrams, and posters on the walls. Everything was covered in an inch of dust and appeared to have not been used. touched in a long time. Why would anyone put a classroom down here? I mumbled to myself.

How would they even convince students to get down here in the first place? I remember thinking at that point that I must have somehow discovered a backway into the other wing of the V-shaped Downing Hall. Maybe this is where the old science classes were held before the labs were built. I moved on to the next set of rooms. They were both classrooms, abandoned, dust-classrooms. abandoned, dust-covered, and mostly empty. So were the next pair, and the next.

I saw a total of 12 disused classrooms in that hallway, and a small break room, complete with a lonely coffee pot. I also found two small restrooms. I didn't spend much time checking them out, as the lights didn't work, and I didn't feel like replacing those bulbs. I found myself getting slightly nervous. I was in a strange section of the campus, and I was working alone that night.

In the back of my mind, I just couldn't truly justify the existence, the waste, of a whole floor full of unused classrooms. When I got to the end of the hallway, I met another steel door. I opened it and saw another stairwell. I was fully expecting this stairwell to go up to connect to one of the other main stairwells in Downing Hall.

The stairs went only down. This was the point, I remember, at which I began to get scared. No way, there's no way these stairs go down. How would anybody get down here? The stairwell echoed at me. I should have checked the time. I should have been concerned with finishing my rounds. I should have been hungry for lunch.

I should have run. I started to climb down the stairs. This stairwell was unlit and appeared to be much older and in much worse condition than the others. It was also longer, much longer. After a few minutes of walking down the steps, I began to count them. At every 12 steps there was a small landing, a turn and another set of steps, down. After ten landings I reached another door. It was unlocked and opened easily.

The hinges squealed and the et cetera. echoes died like lost things in the dark. I groped against the left wall for a light switch, and there was none. I checked the right, and the wall was equally smooth. I cast the flashlight around but saw nothing. Nothing forward, nothing to either side, and nothing above. I snapped my fingers, listening for the echo. I may or may not have heard one.

I slowly came to realize that the room into which I had, had entered was enormous, cavernous, possibly the biggest room I had ever physically experienced. I shrank back to the doorway for a moment. This room can't be here, I said to myself. I started to think about going back, but I also started to think about wanting to know what was in there. I took a step forward and another until I was walking steadily into the room. I kept a steady pace, counting my step. I looked over my shoulder every few yards, using the light from the open doorway to orient myself. I walked slowly for a hundred yards, 200 yards, until I saw a dim glow ahead.

The glow got faintly brighter and larger as I walked toward it. Another hundred yards and another, and three more passed until I could make out a small, dim light bulb near a door. That door was of a different type entirely. It was huge, 14 feet tall at least, and half again as wide. The surface was a black metal studded with rivets and bolts, mounted on huge hinges. Across the face of the door, graved into the metal, were words with some strange looping script that I could not recognize. Every surface was carved with that script, or with strange diagram,

made of splayed circle-ended lines. In the center of the door was a large spoke wheel lock, and in the center of the lock was a tiny keyhole. Above the keyhole was a sigil enclosed in three circles. I looked behind me and could not see the light from the stairwell. I couldn't see anything at all. I held the superhero keychain to the dim light and flipped through the keys. Of course, there was only one small battered key that looked as if it might fit.

I inserted it into the lock and turned it. I heard a click and a thud and a sound from within the door like pouring pebbles or dry teeth. I pulled the key from the lock and grasped the spokes of the wheel lock. My heart was racing and sweat was dribbling into my eyes. I turned the spokes to the left, counterclockwise, Wittershins, some buried memory in my headset, and kept turning until the wheel stopped. There was another thud and a crack.

And then, silence. The darkness behind me no longer felt empty. In fact, it felt positively crowded as if I had an audience watching me. I stepped back from the door and flashed my, light around. Still nothing. Dry, empty floor. I turned back to the door, grasped the large cast-iron handles and pulled. Nothing. I tried harder, putting all my weight into the pole, and at the last moment, at the end of my strength, I heard another crack, and the door groaned open on a draft

of cool, stinking air. The smell was heavy, moist, and musky. I had a flash memory of my mother taking me to the zoo as a child and the smell of the cat house with the lions. At the thought of the lions, I let go of the handles and stumbled back a bit. I carefully shone my light into the yawning black crevice of the open door. I saw a short hallway that opened into a small, cramped room. I saw a filthy, rusted metal chair. I saw bones, small bones. I saw, or heard or smelled, a form so black it seemed to suck in the light of my flashlight. I saw a black form rushing towards me, running towards me, filling the hallway, howling and laughing and speaking in a voice that sounded like mountains collapsing. I remember fangs and words that

Turn my bones to rusted glass. I remember feathers and a hand with too many fingers jeweled with something unspeakable, and the smell, the stink of something long-caged. I remember wings. I don't know how long I wandered in the dark, alone under hundreds of feet of rock. There was no light. There was no way to judge time. My flashlight was dead, and my cell phone.

and even small specks of luminescent paint on my cheap wristwatch were dark. There was something wrong with my right leg. It hurt, but I couldn't see enough to find out why. I kept hearing my audience there in that cavernous room. I screamed at them. I felt one of them touched my face and I threw my flashlight at it. The flashlight bounced and rattled and became still somewhere that I, was not.

Something laughed later. I raved and screamed, but didn't throw anything else. I found the doorway after hours or days of crawling. There were no lights in the stairwell. After years of climbing, I crawled into that first forgotten hallway. I sliced my fingers on the crushed remains of the light bulb I had packed in my satchel. I crawled down the hallway and reached the next stairwell. I hauled myself up them and finally out into the boiler room.

When I staggered out of Downing Hall two full days after going in, it was into dim winter daylight and a full police presence. Five people had been found dead on and around the campus. All had been brutally, savagely murdered, bodies spayed open, viscera missing. The teeth marks suggested a wild animal, but the murder scenes and body positioning also displayed a certain intelligence to them. There was also the writings carved into the flesh when it was not yet dead meat.

The cops wouldn't talk about the writing. The cops wouldn't talk to me either, not afterwards. When they first saw me stumble out into the daylight, covered in blood, they assumed I was the perpetrator. They quickly changed their assumptions when the medics pointed out the green stick fracture, the dehydration, the concussion, and the obvious shock. The cops asked a lot of questions, and I answered as best as I could. I told them about the door in the boiler room. They couldn't find it. They showed me the bare smooth wall from where I had crawled, dazed and broken. My track stopped at that wall. Two cops tried breaking through the

wall into that spot only to meet old brick and older earth past that. The cops wanted to know where the long black feathers came from, stuck to my clothes by dried blood. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. The cops, the medics, nobody would look at me anymore. The scar, the medics, nobody, would look at me anymore. The scars on my face, the deep, gouged out writing, was not a sight that most would want to see. I was marked. Whatever I had let out, whatever had killed and eaten five people, and a week later, six more, had marked me as a friend. Tonight's final tale is entitled The Midnight Man, written by Reddeter Vermillion Sky and read by Alex Beale

For the most part, I believe in the paranormal, but there are some things that even I was skeptical about. The Midnight Man was one of those things. I told myself that he was a joke. I even said jokingly that I'd like to meet him. Signed myself regretting those words. I think I'm going to meet him soon. Last night, at about a quarter to one,

I decided it would be a great time to go on a walk with my dog, Ashley. The rain had finally stopped, and she was becoming restless. As I was locking the door, I noticed that something was off. Ashley is a big, goofy golden retriever. She loves to run and play, but she was frozen at the top of the porch. Usually she'll pull the leash so hard that I'll have trouble reaching the key to the door to lock it. This time, nothing. She might as well have been a statue.

She seemed to be looking at something across the cul-de-sac. At first I thought it was a cat, a squirrel, or maybe something hiding underneath the car. After a few minutes of looking, I saw nothing. So I tugged on the leash, tried pushing her, nothing. In the end, I gave up, picked her up, and carried her into the house. As I took off my shoes and put them in the closet, I noticed that she was staring out of the living room window in the same direction she was when we were outside.

That's when I started to get creeped out. There had to be something out there. I walked over to the living room and sat down on the couch. After half an hour of watching the dog, I picked up a book and started to read. Right as I started reading, Ashley started slowly moving her head as if following something. It looks like whatever she was watching was moving across the street towards my lawn. I sat the book down and went up to the window. Now she was looking directly below it, as if something was standing underneath.

I saw nothing but the grass in the wall of the house. It's probably nothing, I thought to myself. Dogs bark and stare at random things all the time. It was probably a squirrel. It made me uneasy enough that I decided it would be best to retreat to the safety of my room. It's on the first floor, but my house is built on a hill that slopes sharply down behind it. There's a balcony outside my room, at least 20 feet from the ground. No way anything can get up there.

They need a good-sized ladder or a grappling hook. I quickly walked down the hall, turning on all the lights between my room and the living room. I went back to get Ashley, who still had not moved from the spot. I was getting worried about her. I'm the type of guy that can watch a horror movie where a person will get brutally slaughtered and not bad an eye. God help me if they kill off a dog. I grabbed some doggy treats and started trying to bribe Ashley to follow me. She ignored them.

So I decided that I was going to have to pick her up again and carry her to my room. I was about to when slowly she started walking alongside the windows, as if following someone who was walking around the house. My stomach dropped. I picked her up, sprinted to my room, and slammed my door shut, locking and barricading it with a recliner. For a few minutes, she was acting normal again, parading around the room with a toy in her mouth, nudging for me to play with her.

So I did, tossing the toy across the room and having her bring it back. After the fourth throw, as she ran by the balcony doors, she stopped and started staring through the glass again. My hands began to shake, and I felt the blood drained from my face. The only thing in that direction was my balcony. I stared at her in horror, and for the first time, she looked back to. I've never seen an animal look more frightened. For a minute we just sat there and stared at each other. other, both of us paralyzed with fear. And then I snapped out of it. I threw my dog onto the bed

and slid my small desk in front of the balcony door. I grabbed duct tape and taped my curtains against the wall, so whatever was out there couldn't see me and I couldn't see it. I knew it was pointless. Whatever was outside knew where I was, no matter what I did. I got into bed with the dog, pulled the blanket over us, and hugged her. We lay there, quivering under the blanket. Suddenly I got that feeling needed, right before silence is broken, that feeling of dread. You know It's coming, but you're too late to react to cover your ears. Because as soon as the thought processes, it happens. Tapping.

I heard tapping on my balcony door. Four taps, four fingers, one after the other. The taps started to travel along the wall in the direction of my bed. Every time they got closer, I felt my heart beat faster and faster. Soon they were right next to my head, and I thought my heart was going to burst through my chest. And then they stopped. I could still hear my heart. heart, still racing. And in the same feeling, before the tapping started, I knew that silence was

going to be broken any second now. This time, there was a faint pop. It sounded like it came from the living. Then another and another, getting closer each time. As the pops got closer, I heard a slight fizz at the end and realized that the light bulbs were going out one by one. Suddenly, the recliner I had in front of my door slid across the room, the base gouging furrows into the wood floor, and smashed into the desk I had barricading the balcony doors. The white bulbs in my room burst, throwing glass onto the floor, and I heard my doorway crack open. Literally, crack. It was like the door was pushed so hard that the frame splintered to let the lock through. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw it. A tall, dark figure in the doorway, dressed in black, head almost

touching the ceiling. It stood there for a few seconds, and that it whispered. Tomorrow, about them. I could almost hear a slight disappointment in its voice. After standing there for another few seconds, it left. I stayed in bed for a few minutes, wondering if I should move, but too afraid to try. Eventually, I got up, swept up the glass from the light bulbs, replaced them, and stayed there the rest of the night. I didn't sleep a week last night. And now I'm wondering, is it possible to be playing the midnight game without the ritual, without my consent?

This whole thing started around midnight, and it ended at about 3 o'clock. The fact that I have been ridiculing the midnight man's existence for the past few days is probably no coincidence. Did I make him angry? Is there a way to stop this? It's noon, and I'm terrified of what might happen tonight. I think if I play the game with him and win, he might leave me alone. I'm not even sure if the rules exist at this point, but I don't know what else to do. I'm afraid. Our sleepless tales have come to an end.

close your eyes drift off and don't look under the bed the no sleep podcast is licensed under a creative commons license 2011 some rights reserved