The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast #10

Episode Date: October 16, 2011

Our tenth episode of The Nosleep Podcast brings you tales of sinister connections and disturbing secrets. Featuring horror stories from the Reddit.com horror writing community, these stories will keep you awake during the long dark hours of the night. This episode features these stories: Prank Call written by Arann Murray (Redditor murraya) and read by Brett Seay (Redditor RockNRollahAyatollah). ETAOIN written by Trevor La Pay (Redditor echomanagement) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone). Boxes written by D. K. Auerbach (Redditor 1000Vultures) and read by Sammy Raynor (Redditor sammysimplicity). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through the murky darkness of the night, when fear banishes sleep. It's the No Sleep podcast. Born from the nightmares of Reddit.com's No Sleep Forum, and featuring tales from Reddit's authors of horror, we present you with tales intended to frighten and disturb, and keep you awake as the night slowly creeps. past. Ayl is entitled Prank Call. A late-night delivery could fetch a nice gratuity unless the recipients decide to deliver a nightmare of their own. This story was written by Aaron Murray and is read by

Brett C. I work in a fast food restaurant as a delivery truck until about 1 a.m. every night. I'm no stranger to be outside in the dark Going up to houses they'd be a little creepy or old But that changed Three nights ago, I got a delivery to a house A few miles outside ten I was happy enough because it meant I would get a pretty decent tip I followed the directions precisely

Go out the north road Take the third left All Church on right half a mile up the road. Take a left after the church and up a hill. Turn right at the crossroads and it's the only house on that road about three or four miles down. When I got to the house, I got the creeps. I never have before, but this was something different.

I live in Ireland, so the old houses here are grand and amazing. It was a small old cottage. must have only had three or four rooms in it. All single-pane windows in the outside covered in moss. There was a single light on one. It might have been that the windows were dirty or that the light wasn't strong, but I could barely see the two figures sitting at the table. I walked up to the waist-high gate and pushed it open.

As soon as I had stepped into the garden, I felt immediately on edge. The figures in the kitchen had sat bolt up right, like a dog that sensed intruders. I walked up to the door, nod as there was no doorbell. I could hear the sound of me knocking echo throughout the small village, but there was no reply. I took a step back and looked at the kitchen window. The light was gone out, and the only source of vision now was my car's headlamps. I began to figure this.

I decided to ring the number that had placed the order. So I went back to my car to get my phone. Red number and try again. Okay, I thought. I'll try knocking one more time. I got back out of the car and the front door was wide open. At the end of the hallway, I could see the two figures standing with their backs facing me. They were tall and extremely thin, so tall that they had to dump to avoid the same.

sealing. Fuck this. It's a pretty good prank. I was out of there, but all the way back in the town, I couldn't help feeling like I was being followed. Nothing worse than all Irish country roads. The overhanging trees and hedgerows on either side felt like they were concealing something that was watching.

I got back to the restaurant and explained that it had been a prank call, and there was nothing more said about it. When I got home that evening, I went straight to sleep. I woke up at 5.13 feeling thirsty, so I went downstairs for a drink. I didn't bother turning on a light because there was one on the fridge when you were getting water from. When I pressed the button on the fridge, the water came on and the light showing bright. There were two faces looking in through the window next to me. I dropped the glass and ran for the sleep.

just in time to see them at the window by my front door. I locked myself into my room until morning came. They were gone. That was three days ago. Every night, I can hear them outside, walking on the gravel in my garden. I get flashes of them looking into my car as I drive. I don't know who they are or what they want. I want them to leave.

Second tale is entitled Itaewin. A crisis hotline can provide much-needed support to those with troubled minds, but it can also make connections to darker forces. This story was written by Trevor Lepey and is read by David Cummings. From 1987 to 1991, I volunteered at a crisis center in Alachua County, Florida. This was in Gainesville, home of the University of Florida. In five-hour shifts, the ACCCC team would answer calls from anyone who needed a non-judgmental person to talk to. And if they needed immediate help, we'd provide it if we could.

As someone who struggled with depression, the death of my dad a few years prior, and various other family problems, working the phones at the ACCCC, was just as cathartic for me as it was for the callers. It didn't look too bad on my grad school applications either. Many of the callers suffered from real clinical disorders, but most of them were sad and lonely castaways with nobody to talk to. Each caller was treated with dignity because there are obvious suicide risks that come along with this type of work.

Unfortunately, this meant that perverts and pranksters that frequented the hotline during the graveyard shift were also handled with kid gloves. I can honestly say that I've heard every type of obscene call, including breathers, moaners, weezers, smooth talkers, and even the occasional knock-knock joke. I remember listening to this one guy spent five minutes on the line munching on what sounded like potato chips. No talking, just crunch, crunch, crunch. The crisis center of wasn't well funded. It was the only full-time inhabitant of an otherwise vacant strip mall on the edge of town, and at night it was the only lit storefront for miles. Across the street

was a notoriously seedy trailer park, and behind it was an expanse of swamps and cheap ranchland populated by misguided gator farmers, and the intensely rural. The graveyard shift wasn't too bad when there were two or three volunteers, but working solo was unnerving, even for us guys. It was during one of these solo nights that I first met, Itaewen Sherdlou. Now, this was in August of 1990. I'd been putting in extra hours at night because we'd always lose volunteers at the start of the university semester. At around 3 a.m., I got my first call, which went something like this. A crisis center, how...

This is a safe place. Everything's going to be fine. Ateowin would call during every graveyard shift, but only when I was working, and only when I was alone. The letters sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn't remember where I'd heard them before. He would always ask these morbid interview questions, like what my biggest fears were, or if I thought hell was a real place, and would always disconnect shortly thereafter.

I didn't think much of it at first, as Ateowen was just as harmless as the other prank callers, and definitely more interesting. As the weeks went by, there was an epidemic of weirdness at the crisis center. Office supplies went missing from the storage room. The power would routinely go out at night, and people kept finding the door to the main. mini-fridge wide open. The worst thing, though, was finding what looked like crowbar scuffs around the back door leading to the parking lot. On top of all this, Ettaewan kept calling, and his calls were getting more disturbing and personal. A crisis center, how can I help? Hi, Ettaewan. Gone. Two legs or four legs?

I remember the power cutting out right after the disconnect, and nearly pissing my pants as a result. After that, everything about the crisis center, and maybe even the whole city, fell under a black cloud for me. It might have been depression, but there was this palpable sense that something bad was going to happen. If I had to describe the feeling in a word, I'd use, unclean. One early fall evening, I got a call from the ACCCC coordinator to run the graveyard shift after the scheduled volunteer landed herself in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

I started the solo shift at midnight. It didn't go well. Amidst a spate of unusually aggressive perverts, one caller threatened to kill himself, followed by another guy who threatened to kill his wife. I kept hearing knocking sounds coming from the storage room, and the power flickered on it off every 15 minutes. Three hours later, faithful as ever, Itteowen called. Tony Crisis Center, how can I help? Lights cut out. A thump came from the rear hallway near the storage room. Flashlight in hand, I made my way to the back of the office. The storage room was empty. Another loud thump followed. It was coming from the back door behind me. I lit up the brass doorknob and my heart froze when I saw it turned slowly back and forth. I spun around

and bolted for the front door as the pounding grew louder behind me. I heard the whoosh of the back door swinging open as I sprinted out into the parking lot. As I fumbled for the keys to my Pontiac, I saw a dark figure prowling the office, pausing to look at me through the front window. I nearly hit a lamp post as I jumped the curb and raced back to my apartment. I called the police, but they didn't find anything but a busted back door. Nothing was stolen, and Atayowin never called back after that. Days later, a man named Danny Rowling began a robbery and murder spree in the area by breaking into local offices and apartments.

The bodies of five young students were discovered brutally murder. murdered and mutilated as they slept in their apartments. Our final tale is entitled, Boxes. Reuniting with a lost friend can bring great joy unless it also means encountering a far more disturbing secret. This story was written by D.K. Auerbach and is read by Sammy Raynor. I spent the summer before my first year of elementary school

learning how to climb trees. There was one particular pine tree right outside my house that seemed almost designed for me. It had branches that were so low, I could easily grab them without a boost, and for the first couple of days after I first learned how to pull myself up, I would just sit on the lowest branch dangling my feet. The tree was outside our back fence and was easily visible from the kitchen window, which was just above the sink. Before too long, my mother and I developed a routine where I would go play on the tree

when she washed the dishes because she could easily see me when she did other things. As the summer passed, my abilities grew and before too long I was climbing fairly high. As the tree got taller, its branches not only got thinner, but more widely spaced, and so I eventually reached a point where I couldn't actually climb any higher, and so the game had to change. I began to concentrate on speed, and in the end, I could reach my highest branch in 25 seconds. I got too confident, and one afternoon I tried to step up. from a branch before I had firmly grasped the next one. I fell about 20 feet and broke my arm

really badly in two places. My mom was running toward me yelling and I remember her sounding like she was underwater. I don't remember what she said, but I do remember being surprised by just how white my bone was. I was going to start kindergarten with a cast and wouldn't even have any friends to sign it. My mom must have felt terrible because the day before I started school, she brought home a kitten. He was just a kiddard. a baby and was striped with tan and white. As soon as she put him down, he crawled into an empty case of soda that was sitting on the floor. I named him Boxes. Boxes was only an outside cat when he escaped. My mom had him declawed so he wouldn't destroy the furniture, so as a result,

we did our best to keep him inside. He'd get out every now and then, and we'd find him somewhere in the backyard, chasing some kind of bug or lizard, though he could hardly ever catch one, because he had no front claws. He was pretty evasive, but we'd always catch him and carry him back inside. He'd scrammed a look back over my shoulder. I told my mom that it was because he was planning his strategy for next time. Once inside, we'd give him some tuna fish, and he came to learn with the sound of the can opener might signal.

He'd come running whenever he heard it. This conditioning came in handy later, because toward the end of our time in that house, boxes would get out much more often, and would run under the house into the crawl space where neither of us wanted to follow, because it was cramped and probably crawling with bugs and rodents. Ingeniously, my mom thought to hook the can opener to an extension cord out back and run it right outside the hole that boxes had gone through. Eventually, he would emerge with his loud muse, looking excited by the sound, and then horrified at how we could run such a cruel ruse on him.

A can opener with no tuna made no sense to boxes. The last time he escaped to Under the House was actually our last day in it. My mom had put the house on the market and we had begun packing our things. We didn't have much and we stretched the packing out a while, though I had already packed up all of my clothes at my mom's request. My mom could tell I was really sad about moving and wanted the transition to be smooth for me, and I guess she thought that having the clothes in the box would reinforce the idea that we were moving, but things wouldn't change that much.

When boxes got out as we were loading some more things into the moving ban, my mom cursed because she had already packed the can opener and wasn't sure where it. was. I pretended to go look for it so I wouldn't have to go under the house, and my mom, probably completely aware of my little scam, moved one of the panels and crawled in. She came out with boxes pretty quickly and seemed pretty unnerved, which made me feel even better about getting out of it. My mom made some phone calls, and while I packed a little more, and then she came into my room and told me that she had spoken to the realtor, and we were going to start moving into the other house that day. She said it was like excellent news, but I had thought that

thought we had more time in the house. She originally said that we weren't moving until the end of the next week, and it was only Tuesday. What's more, we weren't even completely finished packing yet, but my mom said sometimes it was just easier to replace things than pack them and haul them all over the city. I didn't even get to grab the rest of my box clothes. I asked if I could call Josh to say bye, but she said that we could just call him from our new house. We left in the moving van. I managed to stay in touch with Josh for years, which is surprising since we no longer went to the same school. Our parents weren't close friends, but they knew that we were, and so they would accommodate our desire to see one another by driving us back and forth for sleepovers,

sometimes every weekend. For Christmas one year, our parents even pulled their money and got us some really nice walkie-talkies that were advertised to work from a range that extended past the distance between our houses. They also had batteries that could last for days if the walkie-talkie was on but not used. They would only occasionally work well enough that we could talk across the city, but when we stayed over, we'd use them around the house, talking in mock radio speak that we'd taken from movies, and they worked great for that.

Thanks to our parents, we were still friends when we were 10. One weekend, I was staying over at Josh's, and my mom called to say good night. She was still pretty watchful, even when she couldn't actually watch me, but I had gotten so used to it that I didn't even notice, even if Josh did. She sounded upset. Boxes was missing. This must have been a Saturday night

because I had spent the night at Josh's the previous night and was going to go home the next day because we had school on Monday. Boxes had been missing since Friday afternoon. I gathered that she had not seen him since returning home after dropping me off. She must have decided to tell me he was missing because if he didn't come home before I did,

then I would be devastated at not only his absence but how she could have kept it from me. She told me not to worry. He'll come back. He always does. But boxes didn't come back. Three weekends later, I stayed at Josh's again. I was still upset about boxes,

but my mom told me that there had been many times when pets had disappeared from home for weeks, or even months, only to return on their own. She said that they always knew where home was and would always try to get back. I was explaining this to Josh when a thought hit me so hard,

that I interrupted my own sentence to say it out loud. What if Boxes thought of the wrong home? Josh was confused. What? He lives with you. He knows where home is. But he grew up somewhere else, Josh. He was raised in my old house a couple of neighborhoods away.

Maybe he still thinks of that place is home like I do. Oh, I get it. Well, that'd be great. We'll tell my dad tomorrow and he'll take us over there so we can look. No, he won't, man. My mom said that we couldn't ever go back to that place because the new owners wouldn't want to be bothered. She said that she told your mom and dad the same thing.

Josh persisted. Okay, then, we'll just go out exploring tomorrow, make our way back to your old house. No. If we get spotted, your dad will find out, and then so will my mom. We have to go there ourselves. We have to go there tonight.

It didn't take much convincing to get Josh on board since he was usually the one to come up with these ideas. like this, but we had never snuck out of his house before. It actually turned out to be incredibly easy. The window in his room opened to the backyard, and he had a latched wooden fence that wasn't locked. After those two minor hurdles, we slipped off into the night, flashlight, and walkie-talkies in hand. There were two ways to get from Josh's house to my old house. We could walk on the street and make all the turns, or go through the woods, which would have taken about half the time. It would have taken about two hours to walk there taking the street, but I suggested

that we go that way anyway. I told him it was because I didn't want to get lost. Josh refused and said that if we were seen, they might recognize him and tell his dad. He threatened to go home if we didn't just take the shortcut. I accepted it because I didn't want to go by myself. Josh didn't know about the last time I walked through those woods at night. The woods were much less creepy with a friend and a flashlight, and we were making pretty good time. I wasn't entirely sure where we were, but Josh seemed confident enough, and that bolstered my morale. We passed through a particularly thick patch of tangled trees when the strap of my walkie-talkie got caught on a branch. Josh had the flashlight, and so I was struggling to get the walkie free when I heard Josh say,

Hey man, want to go for a swim? I looked over to where he was shining the flashlight, though I close my eyes as I did, because I now knew where we were. He was pointing at the pool float. This was where I had woken up in these woods all those years ago. I felt a lump in my throat and the sting of fresh tears in my eyes as I continued to struggle with the walkie. Frustrated, I yanked on it hard enough to break it free, and turned and walked to Josh, who had partially laid down on the pool float in a mock sunbathing pose. As I walked toward him, I stumbled and nearly fell into a fairly large hole that was sitting in the middle of the small clearing, but I regained my balance and stopped right at its edge. It was deep. I was surprised by the size of

the hole, but more surprised by the fact that I didn't remember it. I realized it must not have been there that night because it was the same spot where I had awoken. I put it out of my mind and turned to Josh. Quit messing around, man. You saw I was stuck over there, and you were just laying here joking around in this float. I punctuated the sentence with a kick to an exposed part of the float. A screeching rose from it. Josh's smile inverted. He suddenly looked terrified and was struggling to get off the float, but he couldn't in a quick

manner due to the awkward way he'd been laying on it. Each time he would fall back on the float, the screeching would intensify. I wanted to help Josh, but I couldn't move myself any closer. My legs would not cooperate. I hated these woods. I picked up the flashlight that he'd thrown in his thrashing and shined it on the float, not knowing what to expect. Finally, Josh got off the float and rushed next to me looking at where I was shining the light.

Suddenly, there it was. It was a rat. I started laughing nervously, and we both watched the rat run into the woods, taking the screeches with it. Josh lightly punched me in the arm, the smile slowly returning to his face, and we continued walking. We quickened our pace and made it out of the woods faster than me. we thought we would, and found ourselves back in my old neighborhood.

The last time I had rounded the bend ahead, I had seen my house fully illuminated, and all the memories of what transpired came flooding back. I felt a skipping in my heart as we were finally turning the corner, and about to face the full view of my house, remembering last time how incandescent it was, but this time all the lights were off. From a distance, I could see my old climbing tree, and as my mind traced the steps of casualty backward, I realized that I wouldn't go back here this night if that tree hadn't grown and I was briefly in awe of how all events were like that. As we got closer, I could

see that the lawn looked terrible. I couldn't even guess when it had last been mowed. One of the shutters had partially broken loose and was rocking back and forth in the breeze, and overall the house just looked dirty. I was sad to see my old home in such a state of disrepair. Why would my mom care if we bothered the new owners if they cared so little about where they lived? And then I realized. There were no new owners. The house was abandoned, though it looked simply forsaken. Why would my mom lie to me about our house having new people in it?

But I thought that this was actually a good thing. It would be easier to look around for boxes if we didn't have to worry about being spotted by the new family. This would make it much quicker. Josh interrupted my thoughts as we walk through the gate and up to the house itself. Your old house sucks, dude, Josh yelled as quick. quietly as he could. Shut up, Josh. Even like this, it's still nicer than your house. Hey, man. Okay, okay.

I think Boxes is probably under the house. One of us has to go under and look, but the other should stay next to the opening in case he comes running out. Are you serious? There's no way I'm going under there. It's your cat, man. You do it. Look, I'll game you for it. Unless you're too scared, I said holding my fist over my upturned palm. Fine, but we go on shoot, not on three.

It's rock, paper, scissors, shoot, not one, two, three. I know how to play the game, Josh. You're the one who always messes up, and it's two out of three. I lost. I wiggled loose the panel that my mom would always move when she had to crawl under here for boxes. She only had to do it a couple times since the can opener trick usually worked, but when she had to do it, she hated it, especially that last time.

And as I looked into the darkness of the crawl space, I had a greater appreciation for why. Before we moved, she said that it was actually better that boxes ran under here, despite how hard it could be to get him out. It was less dangerous than him jumping over the fence and running around the neighborhood. All that was true, but I was still dreading doing this. I grabbed the flashlight and the walkie and began to crawl in. A powerful smell overtook me. It smelled like death.

I turned on my walkie. I sat down the walkie and moved the flashlight around as I crawled forward. Looking through the hole from the outside, you could see all the way back with the right lighting, but you had to be inside to see around the support blocks that held up the house. I'd say that there was about 40% of the area that you couldn't see unless you were actually in the crawl space, but even inside I discovered that I could only see directly where the flashlight was pointing. I realized that this would make scouting around the place much more difficult.

As I moved the flashlight forward, the smell intensified. The fear was growing inside me that boxes had come here and something had happened to him. I shined the flashlight around but couldn't see much of anything. I wrapped my fingers around a support block to support myself, and as I did, I felt something that made my hand recoil. Fur. My heart sank, and I prepared myself emotionally for what I was about to see. I crawled slowly so I could prolong what I knew. was coming, and I inched my eyes and the flashlight passed the block to see what was on the other

side. I staggered back in horror. Jesus Christ, escaped my trembling mouth. It was a hideous and twisted creature, badly decomposed. Its skin had rotted away on its face, so the teeth appeared to be enormous, and the smell was unbearable. I reached for the walkie. No, no, it's not boxes. I shined the light on it again, and looked at it with less fear in my vision. I chuckled. I looked and saw that he was telling the truth. Some of his points were good, and I doubted he'd be able to get in anyway. I realized that it would be pitch black in there.

The power would have been turned off since no one was paying the bill. With any luck, he'd be able to see from the street lights that might cast some light inside. Otherwise, I'm not sure what he'd do. Before too long, I heard footsteps right over my head and felt old dirt raining down on me. I could hear him laughing without the walkie and started laughing too. I heard the footsteps fade away a little. He was on his way to my room. I started thinking that maybe my mom had come back and gotten the clothes and just given them away

because I'd outgrown a lot of them, but I remembered leaving the boxes there. I didn't even have time to close the last one up before we left. While I was waiting for Josh to tell me what he found, I kicked out my leg, which had started falling asleep because of the position I was in and it hit something. I looked back and saw something really strange. It was a blanket, and all around it there were balls. Crawled a little closer to it. The blanket smelled moldy, and most of the balls were empty,

but one had something that I recognized still in it. Cat food. It was a different kind than we gave to boxes, but I suddenly understood. My mom had set up a little place for boxes to encourage him to come here instead of running around the neighborhood. That made a lot of sense, and it seemed even more likely that boxes would have come back to this place. That's so cool, Mom, I thought.

I found your clothes. I felt a chill. This was impossible. I had packed all my clothes. Even though we weren't supposed to move for another two weeks when we left, I remember packing them and thinking that it was stupid for me to have to get clothes out of the box and put them back in. I had packed them, but someone had hung them back up. Why, though?

Josh needed to get out of there. That can't be right, Josh. Stop messing around and just come back outside. No joke, man. I'll tell you left him. Silence. I checked my walkie to see if I had switched it off somehow. It was fine.

I could hear footsteps, but couldn't tell exactly where Josh was going. I waited for Josh to finish his sentence, thinking that his finger had just slipped off the button. He didn't continue. He seemed to be stomping around the house now. I was just about to radio him when he came back. His voice was hushed and broken. I could hear he was on the verge of tears.

I wanted to respond, but how loud was his walkie turned up? What if the other person heard it? I said nothing and just waited and listened. What I heard were footsteps. Heavy, dragging footsteps. And then a loud thud. Oh, God. Josh.

He'd been found. I was sure of it. This person had found him and was hurting him. I broke out into tears. He was my only friend next to boxes. And then I realized, what if Josh told him I was under here? What could I possibly do?

As I struggled to compose myself, I thankfully heard Josh's voice through the walkie. I was paralyzed. I wanted to run home. I wanted to save Josh. I wanted to go for help. I wanted so many things, but I just lay there, frozen. As I lay unable to move, my eyes focused on the corner of the house that was right under my room. I moved my flashlight. My breath hitched at what I saw. Animals. Dozens of them. All of them dead. They lay in piles all around the perimeter of the crawl space. Could boxes be among these corpses?

Was this what the cat food was for? Seeing this broke my shock as I knew I had to get out of there and I scrambled to the board. I pushed on it, but it wouldn't budge. I couldn't move it because it was wedged in there and I couldn't get my fingers around it since the edges were outside. I was trapped. God damn you, Josh, I whispered to myself. I could feel thunderous footsteps above me. The house was shaking.

I heard Josh scream And it was matched by another scream That wasn't full of fear As I continued pushing I felt the board move And I knew it wasn't me who was moving it I could hear footsteps above me And in front of me

And shouting and screaming Filling the brief silence between the footsteps I moved back and held my walkie Ready to try and defend myself And the board was thrown to the side And an arm shot in and grabbed for me Let's go man now It was Josh

Thank God I scrambled out of the opening holding the flashlight and the walkie When we got to the fence we both jumped it But Josh's walkie fell He reached for it and I told him to forget it We had to move Behind us I could hear yelling

Though they weren't words Only sounds And we perhaps foolishly Ran for the woods to get back to Josh's quicker And be somewhat harder to follow The whole way through the woods, Josh kept yelling, My picture! He took my picture! But I knew the man already had Josh's picture.

From all those years ago at the ditch. I suppose Josh still thought those mechanical sounds were from a robot. He made it back to Josh's house and back into his room before his parents woke up. I asked him about the big bag and if it really moved, and he said he couldn't be sure. He kept apologizing about dropping the walker. at the house, but obviously that wasn't a big deal. We didn't go to sleep and we sat peering out the window, waiting for him. I went home later that day as it was about 3 a.m. already.

I told my mom the basics of this story a couple days ago. She broke down and was furious about the danger I put myself in. I asked her why she made all those things up about bothering the new owners to stop me from going. Why did she think the new house was so dangerous? She became irate and hysterical, but she answered my question. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it harder than I thought her capable of and locked her eyes onto mine, whispering as if she was afraid of being overheard. Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for boxes.

You weren't the only one to find them. I felt dizzy. I understood so much now. I understood why she had looked so uneasy after she brought boxes out from under the house. on her last day there. She found more than spiders or a rat's nest that day. I understood why we left almost two weeks early. I understood why she tried to stop me from going back. She knew. She knew he made his home under ours, and she kept it from me. I left without saying another word and didn't finish the story for her, but I want to finish it here, for you. I got home from Josh's

that day and threw my stuff on the floor, and it scattered. everywhere. I didn't care. I just wanted to sleep. I woke up around 9 p.m. to the sound of boxes meowing. My heart leapt. He'd finally come home. I was a little sick about the fact that if I had just waited a day, none of the previous night's events would have happened and I'd have boxes anyway. But that didn't matter. He was back. I got off my bed and called for him, looking around to catch a glint of light off of his eyes. The crying continued and I followed it. It was coming from under the bed. I laughed a little thinking I had just crawled under a house looking for him and how this was so much better. His meows were being muffled by a

shirt, so I flung it aside and smiled yelling, welcome home, boxes. His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie. Boxes never came home. This concludes this episode of the No Sleep Podcast. Thank you for listening and for letting us share the blackness of the night with you. To learn more about the podcast and the ways you can help us make more episodes, please visit nosleepaudio.reddit.com.