The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S10E23

Episode Date: April 29, 2018

"Not Everything Drowns "† written by V.R. Gregg and performed by David Cummings. (Story starts around 00:02:30) "Dad's Famous Preserves"¤ written by Seras Nikita and performed by Peter Lewis & Mick Wingert & Kyle Akers & Mike DelGaudio. (Story starts around 00:21:20) "The Final Victim of Hopkins' Pit"† written by Luke Hoehn and performed by Erin Lillis & Mike DelGaudio & Jesse Cornett & Nikolle Doolin. (Story starts around 01:07:00) "Dusk on Old Arcadia"‡ written by Marcus Damanda and performed by Jessica McEvoy & Mike DelGaudio & Jeff Clement & Nichole Goodnight & Jesse Cornett & Addison Peacock & Marcus Damanda & Atticus Jackson & Matthew Bradford. (Story starts around 01:35:00) Click here to learn more about the voice actors on The NoSleep Podcast   Click here to listen to the Summer Series   Click here to learn more about V.R. Gregg   Click here to learn more about Seras Nikita   Click here to learn more about Luke Hoehn   Click here to learn more about Marcus Damanda   Executive Producer & Host: David Cummings Musical score composed by: Brandon Boone - Accordion music courtesy of Travis Vengroff Audio adaptations produced by: Phil Michalski† & Jeff Clement‡ & Jesse Cornett¤ "Dad's Famous Preserves" illustration courtesy of Jen Tracy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Jessica. Hey, David. The end of season 10 is almost here. Looking forward to a bit of time off before season 11? I am. It's always good to take a break from horror stories and clear my head. That's true. Even no sleep listeners can benefit from that every now and then.

That's right. Even though the No Sleep podcast can be a chance to forget about real life for a while. It's a great way to escape. And that's important, but we can't forget to look after ourselves either. Ignoring our mental health isn't the way to go. It's important to get stuff off your chest, wouldn't you agree? Absolutely. That's what makes Talkspace such an important service.

It's the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time. All you need is a computer with internet connection or the TalkSpace mobile app. That means you can improve your mental health even if you've had trouble making time for it in the past. Way back in my day, therapy like this required going to a... therapist's office to get help. That took time and it wasn't very convenient. Well, with Talk Space, therapy is as easy as sending your therapist a message. Share what's on your mind whenever you need. Talk about everyday challenges at work or at home. Just chat about life. There are no extra commutes, no leaving the office, and no judgments. Convenience is important and talk space

really works. Being able to share what's bothering you, even the so-called little things which can affect you emotionally. Remember that therapy isn't just dredging up the most significant deep-seated issues. It's also about practical everyday strategies for stress management and living a happier life. Having a therapist simply provides a designated person for you to talk to who's trained to listen and help you make positive changes. The Talkspace platform has over 2,000 licensed therapists who are experienced in addressing life challenges we all face. To match with a perfect therapist for a fraction of the price of traditional therapy, our listeners can go to talkspace.com slash no sleep and use the offer code no sleep to get

$30 off your first month. That is great advice. Well, Jessica, I hope you enjoy your day off before season 11. Day off? Just one day? Aren't we supposed to... Nope. Sorry.

We need to keep you. working so we can get episodes ready for the new season. Don't worry. So far, we've only got you assigned for 12 stories. That's a lot. Are you sure I can't have a little more time? A little more? More stories? Oh, you got it. Glad to see your gung-ho to record as much as possible. You sure do know how to make a person feel needed, Cummings. Excuse me, I have to go sign up for a certain online therapy. Remember, Jessica, that's talkspace.com slash no sleep with the offer code no sleep. The following audio horror presentation is intended to frighten and disturb. Join us on this dark

and unsettling journey at your own list. Because behind these doors, there will be no sleep. Brace yourself for the no sleep podcast. It's the no sleep. It's the no sleep. Late podcast, I'm David Cummings. Thanks for joining us. On the show this week, we have four tales about entombed entities, sinister seasons, and excised evangelicals. In the past few months, there's been a common question we've received from many listeners. I thought it might be helpful to address it here. In each episode's show notes, we provide a list of the stories we do. Often, we will link to where a given story is posted online for people to read along or reference later. With more and more of our stories being submitted to us directly by the authors, it's up to the authors themselves

to choose whether or not to post their writing online. For various reasons, some do post them and others don't. So while we understand that many listeners like to have a text version of our stories available to them, we can only link to where stories are online. So no link means no online versions of the story. I hope that clears things up. And just a reminder that we have the first of two new installments of Marcus D' Amanda's summer series on this episode. Check the show notes for the link to our SoundCloud playlist where all eight of the previous parts of this story are available to one and all. Get caught up before summer catches you. So as season 10 enters the final stretch, there's still plenty of race to be run. We've got our running show. We've got our running

on, the stories are ready, so let's start the journey. In our first tale, we meet a man who makes money by finding lost treasure. But as author V.R. Greg shares, the treasures he finds are at the bottom of a cold lake and consist of things people lose from their boats. When an ignored cove becomes his dive spot, he discovers things which are anything but treasured. So keep this in mind as you swim or dive the waters. Not everything drowns. It's not an easy job, scavenging the lake. It's filthy, for one. All those rich assholes from the cities come in on their six-figure boats to convene in Party Cove, where they vomit and piss themselves to dehydration right into the water. By this point, the composition of the lake is probably more Coors and E. coli than

H-2-O. Second, you don't get a whole hell of a lot out of it. Some days you make bank, gold watches and expensive sunglasses that just need a little cleaning to be ready to sell for a nice profit. You'd be shocked by what people will take and subsequently lose in the water. I once found a whole wallet stuffed with 300 bucks in the muck at the bottom of the lake. Once those bills dried out, they spent the same as any other. but most days you don't find hardly anything at all.

It's seasonal too. This time of year there ain't nobody out except for the local fishermen, and I'll be damned if they have anything worth diving for. I use the winters to expand my horizons, branch out beyond grand glaze, and explore the rest of the lake. That's what brought me out to an under-explored cove, hoping to find something buried in the muck. It was a cold gray day, the kind where all you want to do is curl up with a bottle of whiskey and sleep most of it away.

That was out of the question for me, on account of I'm an entrepreneur and all. Instead, I drove my little John boat out along the lake's jagged coastline until I came to the cove I've been eyeing on my map. There wasn't a soul around, and when I shut off the motor, I couldn't hear anything but silence. The coast this far down lacked the boat slips and cheap condos that marred the landscape elsewhere. Nothing but gray oaks and hickories as far as I could see. I took a moment to enjoy the calmness of it all before suiting up. I took my time getting ready. Partly it was out of habit, and partly it was because I had no particular desire to submerge myself into the frigid water.

There was always that game this time of year. chicken against myself until my balls were well and truly fortified. I dangled my fins over the edge of the boat and dropped down into the murky water. If you've never lake dived before, you may not understand what murky truly means. It means you're fucked when it comes to seeing more than a few inches in front of your face. The silt stirs up with barely any movement at all, and I'm not a graceful fella. frog kicks or no. Anyway, Viz was low as it always is in the lake. I spent the first part of the dive feeling around in the soft mud a couple hundred feet offshore, but not much was coming up.

Fishing lures, flip-flops, crumpled beer cans, the usual. I slowly began moving out toward deeper water, hoping to find something worthwhile so that I could go home and do that whiskey thing. I was down deep, probably 15 meters, when I saw the first tree. Trees weren't necessarily an unusual sight. When they made the lake, they flooded the whole goddamn countryside just about. Trees, fields, homes. Mostly they raised it all beforehand, but sometimes you stumble on tree trunks. This, however, was not a tree trunk.

It was a whole tree, branches, leaves. leaves and all, just like it was the middle of the summer. In the brown cast of the water, the leaves shone green and full, practically shimmering and throbbing with life. I looked up. In the dim, muddy light, the branches extended up as far as I could see. I felt suddenly small and vulnerable in the dark shadow of the canopy. I kicked my legs behind me, propelling forward past the tree. To my surprise, I was greeted by another, and another after that. A long stretch of living trees stood in a line on either side of me, a promenade at the bottom of the lake. At first I thought I was getting turned around, passing the same tree over and over again.

Like I said, Viz was low, but no, I was swimming down a goddamn tree-lined street right there, under the lake. The current was slow and the silt settled around me, opening up the view some. In front of me, the line of trees extended as far as I could see, behind me the same. To my right was an open, grassy space. To my left, a two-story building surrounded by a cluster of small wooden ones. I was in a town. I swam toward the building. I could make out a single word on a wooden sign, L and Lynn. I blinked, and as I did so, the building transformed into a burned-out husk of a structure. I blinked again and shook my head. The building was back as it was, intact and undisturbed. I paddled backward, feeling suddenly uneasy. What had been an interesting

find was turning into something else entirely. That's when I had another thing. thought. Where were the fish? I spun around but saw no sign of life anywhere. There was no movement in the grass, in the trees. I needed to surface. That was all I knew. I was about to swim up when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Something shot between the two buildings. It was bigger than a fish, but I couldn't tell exactly what it was. My blasted curiosity got the better of my common sense. I swam toward it. The dark figure darted again between the buildings, and I followed at a distance. Finally, it stopped long enough that I could see it clearly. It was a kid, or something not unlike a kid. It was hard to see through the muck I'd stirred up. The figure was dark

and small, but shaped like a person. It stopped in front of a small white house. It stopped in front of a small, white house, bicycles and dolls dotted the green lawn. Before it disappeared into the open door, I could have sworn I heard a giggle. I stared at the house, frozen in disbelief and fear. A dull yellow light pulsed slowly in the window. Despite myself, I moved toward it, pulling through the grassy yard. The glass was still intact, undisturbed, by the water that surrounded it. I grabbed onto the window pane, trying my best to keep out of view. Through the window, a family sat around a dinner table.

Their hands clasped together in what looked like prayer. Candles burned in the middle of the table, their flames flickering even though surrounded by water. There were six people, two larger figures, four smaller. The littlest one couldn't have been. more than a toddler. Even through the murky water, I could tell they were burned. Flakes of blackened skin floated along their naked, charred bodies, held on by thin slivers of tissue. I gulped down air from my regulator. None of it made sense. Those bodies were clearly dead, burned, and drowned.

There was no way candles could be lit under water. There was no way any of the body. Any of the this was happening. I shut my eyes tightly and opened them again. The family was still there, still with bowed heads. One of the little ones raised its head, and I watched wide-eyed as it pointed a thin finger in my direction, its mouth opening in surprise. The others turned their heads slowly, deliberately to look at me. I scrambled back, falling away from the window. The seen inside vanished from my view, but not before I caught sight of the largest one rising from its seat. I turned and swam, not worrying about the muck I was kicking up behind me. It was a mistake. I wasn't sure which direction I was headed as I started to swim upward. I hit my head hard

on a tree limb, and the pain drove me back down, suspending me just beyond the yard of the burned house. A low moan rippled through the current, close and mournful. I was crushed by a sense of dread and sorrow. For a moment, I felt like I could cry, like I was so far removed from light and joy that even saving my own life was fruitless. In the midst of the pain and heartache, the moan stopped and the water cleared. They were behind me, just standing and warm. watching all in a row, biggest to smallest. The little one had its hand raised in front of its eyes, as if it couldn't bear to watch.

My stomach sank as I swam away, pulling against a current that seemed hell-bent on dragging me back toward the house. In my panicked flailing, my breathing grew shallow, and I realized I had something else to worry about. How long had I been in the water? The depth and the exertion, My air. I looked down at my pressure gauge and my heart sank.

During my dive training, one thing that was drilled into my head over and over again was how important it was to remain calm, particularly when you're low on air. I don't imagine the instructor had underwater fire zombies in mind when he gave that talk. I squeezed my eyes shot and clenched my fists. Don't look back. I repeated to myself, trying to banish the black figures from my mind. But I did look back. They were still standing behind me just as they had been. I concentrated on my breathing.

In, out. They weren't pursuing me at the very least. I could do this. I could swim back to my boat and be fine. I just had to move. Why wasn't I moving? As I hovered there, held in place by the current that swirled around me, I watched in growing understanding as the largest figure opened its mouth.

The water burst into waves around him, circling out wider and wider. The moan. If I had to hear it again, I knew I wouldn't move. I knew I couldn't move in that crushing sadness. I knew I'd fall to the lake floor, watch my air dwindle to nothing and be glad for it. I clenched my fists and swam hard. My muscles protested and my lungs burned as I propelled myself through the water. It felt thick and viscous like I was swimming through chowder. Dimly I could see the gray light of the winter

sky above me and I pushed past what my aching legs and empty lungs would allow. When I breached the surface I could have cried. nearly did, if I'm being honest. I took out my regulator and gulped down the cold air in desperate heaving breaths. When at last my lungs stopped quivering, I saw that I was further away from my boat than I had guessed. It glinted across the empty lake as I slowly made my way back to it. I collapsed onto the aluminum boat and lay shivering until well past dark. My mind slipped over what I was.

I had seen, barely grasping something before retreating again into the fog. When the cold became too much to bear and hypothermia became a legitimate concern, I started up the motor and headed toward home. Home? What a fucking joke. Every piece of furniture was black and charred until I blinked and it shimmered back to normalcy. The place stank of mildew and fish and burning flesh, not even a gallon of pine-scented bleach could change it. Home, I didn't dive again, couldn't bring myself to do it. I told my diving buddies that the winter cold had been too hard on my joints.

Asked them if they had ever seen anything strange under the water. Strange, they asked, like stranger than bikini tops and rinds. rescue inhalers. Yeah, something like that, I told them while they shrugged. I took to hanging out at the library, since it was warm and didn't stink of bloated death. I learned a lot about the lake and its history. Did you know, for example, that when they flooded the towns to make the lake, they burned them first, just burned whole towns to the ground. Oh, what a thing. Of course they were evacuated first. Of course no one stayed behind to get burned up in their homes. When venturing into the jungle, you have to be well prepared against the life forms

whose home you're invading. Just ask author Seras Nikita. She shares a tale of a family who seeks to do God's work as missionaries, but sometimes even prayer can't prepare you for what lies ahead. Performing this tale are Peter Lewis, Mick Wingert, Kyle Acres, and Mike Delgado. So take a stand and sample some of Dad's famous preserves. When I was 11 and my brother Rourke was 16, Dad moved us to the jungle to deliver the Lord's good word to the people who lived there. He must have thought it would change us, make us into men, lift us above the everyday sins of the other boys littering the stoops of Boston. That's what he called them, everyday sins.

Dad said that everyday sins were small things, small things, like not telling the Irish girl who lives in the building across the way that maybe the cat's been sitting in her window because the way her curtains fall lately, they bunch up around the pole string, And if a person were bending down in just the right way, for example, on his knees whispering prayers before bed, he might see right through the gap to whomever might be standing there, blow-drying her hair and clean white panties. Every day sins can sneak up on you, son. Like bees.

One or two aren't so bad. But when you get a swarm of them together, you're in. Big trouble. Dad had black hair and a mouth that could smile all the way to the corners of his eyes. He was not a religious fanatic or a child abuser, if that's what you're thinking. Dad never beat us with Bibles or locked us in closets or forced us to grasp crucifixes heated over burners. No, he was just an electrician-turned preacher, who, in addition to being fond of analogies, believed that God would want men and boys to wear healed shoes and pressed shirts while they were delivering the good news.

He'd been flipping a batch of Dad's famous hot cakes while he delivered the analogy about the bees. Dad cooked us hot meals all the time, and everything he made was famous. They'll sting you swollen, son, if you give them a chance. You have to be on the lookout. He put the plate of hot cakes on the table, and we ate them together in the warm kitchen with syrup and butter and cold milk. There were no bees in the jungle. The native women were not like the Irish girl, or the lady with a tiny waist on the detergent box. Their breasts fell to their navels like cupfuls of cold molasses, sinking slowly down their chests.

They were the first breasts I'd ever seen up close. Instead of using a toilet, the villagers squatted over holes and their nails were thick and yellow. They were all missing a toenail or a fingernail and sometimes more than one. The girls poked pieces of wood and bone through holes in their noses and ears, and sometimes lumps of scar tissue bloomed up around the holes like chunks of white lime built up around our drain at home. They squatted next to coal beds while they could. Some nights the firelight showed me there, down there, hair and dark parts beneath that hung like flaps.

Some had brown and black tattoos on their faces. Some of their heads were as bald as eggs. The men were strong and glossy and hard. They hunted monkeys and butchered them with their hands. Then they cooked up the meat and the guts, too. They even broke open the bones and dug inside. with their thumbs and then ate the stuff that came out. Sometimes they pulled out the guts before the monkey even stopped breathing.

The children turned over logs and found white grubs the size of pecans that they roasted on sticks before chewing them up. They watched the moon and some nights they smeared things on themselves and danced in front of bonfires. One night I saw a baby born. Inside our chapel was very, very hot. The walls and roof were made of heavy pine planks. The planks were the first thing we brought in once the road was cleared. Father Klausen was showing us how to fan out mosquito nets over our beds and wait them at the bottom. He pointed to the four glass windows looking very proud.

From a pair of very charitable Christians in Long Island. Real glass. They let the light of Christ shine. right in. I doubt there's another set of glass windows for 300 miles in any direction. The windows didn't open. The air in the chapel was as hot and heavy as the steam that used to hiss from dad's iron. Beads of sap oozed from the pine lumber, scenting the smother like Christmas time. Everything was sticky. A few villagers curious enough to attend services brought banana leaves to sit on. so that they wouldn't get sap on their bottoms from sitting in the pews.

They fanned themselves with fronds and then stopped coming altogether. Dad said sometimes the good word was like the sound of the ocean. Waves just keep crashing on in the background, and finally a day comes when people see that the waters are cool. People weighed in and try to swim. Some of those people will take to the water like fish, and others might not get the hang of it right away. Some people might only dip in a toe. He'd always drop his voice for the next part.

And some people need us more than anyone else, because by the time they fire for... Dad was from Chicago first, then Minneapolis, and then Boston. He'd signed a year contract for us, and when the review board asked if he had any experience living in the tropical wild, his response was this. I've studied up. To us, he said. If the Swiss family Robinson can do it, so can we watch over us. But not many days had passed before it became clear that neither.

thing was true. We were dangerously ignorant about the jungle. We'd packed useless things, a swimsuit, a gold pocket watch, a red plastic radio that never picked up a station and ran out of batteries after the first week. Dad brought three jars of brill cream because he was afraid he'd run out. Nonetheless, he assured us everything would be okay. We were on the Lord's mission, and he'd He was looking out for us. Those first months were a dark time. Our water filter was a heavy contraption that took both hands and all my weight to pump it. In the heat of the day I'd avoid pumping water until I was so thirsty, my head throbbed,

and then make it worse by exerting myself in the heat. For food, we had a kind of dried porridge with vitamins ground up in it, and you added water to make a sweet, gritty sludge. The best way to get it down was to drink it fast, like cod liver oil. Suffering in button-up shirts and healed shoes with socks, we doled out litanies to the strange natives who looked at us skeptically, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. The village children ran naked in the open air and waited into the brown running stream to splash their dark bodies with water. I tried not to feel bitter thoughts toward them.

On Sundays, Dad offered a sacrament, pressing wafers of host into rough brown hands and making the sign of the cross in the air. On the night in which he was betrayed, Christ broke bread and said, take and eat. This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. The villagers inspected the paperish discs, taking wary nibbles as if tasting an unfamiliar fruit for the first time without knowing if the flesh would send them into fits or cause chaos in their bowels. Nobody understood a word either side was saying. At night, Rorke and I lay beneath the mosquito nets and felt things crawling on us, scratching furrows in our legs with our grimy fingernails. been itchy and paranoid since the night Rourke had found a millipede as long as his forearm

coiled inside his pillowcase. Sometimes we lay in bed and remembered things together, like the icebox back in Boston and the cool fountain in the square. Rory reminded me of Dad's famous potato and fried egg hash with ketchup, and I reminded him of Dad's famous chocolate egg cream, always with an extra sprinkle of Ovaltine on top. One very dark night I dreamed of the Irish girl. She was blow-drying her hair. She turned around and I saw that her breasts were deformed and made of scar tissue. Lumps stacked upon lumps like bunches of half-dried grapes.

Beneath her white panties something bulged and squirmed. The hard, horny head of a giant millipede emerged from one leg of her breast. panties and wound down the inside of her thigh, circling once before disappearing behind her knee. She held up her thumb and there was black stuff on it. She sucked it off and smiled, looking right at me, still holding the blow dryer. Wet the bed that night for the first time in years, but Rory didn't notice. The sheets were always damp anyway and we trained our noses not to smell. things. Four months passed, and Dad was sick. He would stand in the palmettoes behind the chapel and make himself vomit before morning service, so he wouldn't have to stop the sermon when he felt it

coming. Long, flat worms like ribbons came up in the vomit. Yellow stains bloomed in the armpits of his white shirts, and he had to go to the bathroom a lot. He grew thin and grim. Still, he didn't want to leave. He said that nothing was more transient than flesh, and he felt proud that God believed he was strong enough to be tested. Rory and I wondered about this. We also wondered whether or not God considered all meat to be flesh. Were the worms made of flesh?

Were the grubs, the millipede, the monkey guts, were the villagers? What was the difference between? flesh and just regular old meat. We couldn't decide. The infection began with a black dot, the size of a pea on the top of Dad's foot. It looked like the time I'd stepped on a sharpened pencil and a smooth pellet of lead had lodged itself in the web of my big toe. At first, Dad only said it itched. He thought it might be a mosquito bite turned blood blister. Maybe he could just coax out a few drops of blood and the thing would turn back into regular skin. He squeezed it between his thumbnails, but nothing came out. When it was bigger the next day, he tried to prick it with the

corner of his folding razor. The blade barely brushed the dot when dad sucked air over his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, gripping the sides of his foot with both hands as if curling up that way would make the pain stop. The next day, the dot was twice as big, and it was no longer a dot. It was a little brown crater with a black pit, and the ring of skin around the crater was puffy and angry-looking. The day after that, the foot was so swollen, it bulged out of Dad's shoe like rising bread, and a day after that, the shoe didn't fit at all.

For the first time in four months, Dad stayed in bed beneath the mosquito net instead of rising for morning prayer. We tried to cool him by fanning him with fronds the way the villagers did. We pumped the water filter for him and offered him mangoes and porridge. He drank some water and ate a little of the mango, but the porridge came right back up. Dad? When he could no longer bear the heat in the chapel, he could. Crawled outside to lie on the ground in the shade of the giant palmettoes. His hair hung in greasy strings and his forehead was shiny with oil and sweat.

The whites of his eyes had begun to look yellowish. He was embarrassed that he'd had to crawl. Two days later, Dad didn't even think about crawling. All day long he lay moaning under the palmettoes with a mosquito net draped over him, not caring about the ants that marched across his belly or the centipedes making paths through his hair. He kept one hand pressed into his face, either palm down, covering his eyes, or palm out, with the back of it pressing into his mouth. I think he did that so no more pain sounds would come out. Dad hadn't taken off his sock.

He couldn't. The rapid swelling had cinched the seam of the same. elastic tightly around his calf. Flesh bulged above and below the seam, making Dad's lower leg look like a tied sausage. We could have cut the sock off. Despite our ill preparedness in other areas, we'd managed to bring a pocket knife apiece. Rorke even had a tiny pair of scissors that folded out so you could pinch them open and closed with your thumb and forefinger.

But Dad wouldn't let us touch his sock. I think he was afraid to see him. what was happening under there. He didn't want Rory and me to see either, but we knew it was worse than we could imagine, because by then the smell was so bad. Dad's infected leg gave off a smell like feted cheese and rotten hamburger meat. You could smell it 10 feet away. We'd all done a fine job of training our noses to ignore our own smelly underarms and the bouquet of the latrines. hole, but no sane person could ever shut out the smell of Dad's infected leg. My brother and I stole sips of air through our mouths and pretended we didn't notice

as we sat with Dad, distracting him with staged arguments about which of his sermons we remembered best. He distracted us with forced chuckles that doubled him fetal with pain. Dad's moans became high and shrill and shrill. at the end. Consumed, none of us ate or slept. Rory and I didn't know what was expected of us, and Dad was too sick to say. God was nowhere to be found. After Dad slipped into delirium, he could no longer refuse Rourke's pleas to let him run fetch Father Klausen. Rory left the chapel early in the morning, disappearing into the spots of brush that had grown over the

path since we'd walked at last. He didn't come back until nearly dawn. Father Clausen will be here when the sun comes up. He'll bring some men with a cart and a mule to bring dad out. I lifted the mosquito net so Rory could climb into bed next to me. What about a doctor? There isn't one. Rory groaned softly as he settled into the bed. He sounded very tired. Not a real one. Dad'll have to be flown out the way we came in. Father Clausen's already radioed San Tomas for a pilot. Rory was silent for a while.

I told Father Clausen about the smell. He asked me how long, and I told him almost a week. He asked me if we have kin in Boston. You know, just in case... In case, Dad. Rory broke off. a heave, I could tell he wanted to cry. In case the Lord takes Dad before we make it out of here. He said that in an even, weighted voice I'd never heard from Rourke before. Dad was right about

one thing. The jungle had made a man of my brother. The Presbyterian doctor in San Tomas cut off Dad's pants with scissors that were bent flat halfway down so they could slide right between dad's pants and his leg. Then the doctor used his bent scissors to cut dad's sock into squares. When he began to peel away the squares, Dad tore at his sheets and screamed to God for the strength to stand it until a nurse rushed in with more morphine. Father Klausen stood by his head and Rory and I held Dad's hands as each square was peeled away. His leg, It didn't look like a leg anymore. The knee was a black bulge with hard-raised bruises.

In the gaps between bruises were mounds of flesh so swollen that the skin over them was stretched white and split into hard bloodless cracks. Below the knee, the bruises became a forest of brown craters, each with a black pit, like the first one we'd seen on the top of Dad's foot. the one he thought might be a mosquito bite. Square by square, the infection only grew more grotesque. Ripe postules on the calf broke audibly to drip green fluid

that filled the room with its cheesy, sickening smell. Around the ankles, thick, white, and yellow stuff pooled between chunks of diseased tissue. The foot was... nothing more than a spongy grayish mass, like a wet biscuit dissolving in mop water. A lot of the squares wouldn't peel off. They were melded to the leg with crumbles of yellow crust, and trying to peel them just caused more flesh to tear away, exposing Dad's long, white leg bone. The doctor called the squares of stuck sock grafted and said that it probably

happened at the very beginning, before Dad's body stopped, trying to scab over and heal itself. The doctor gave up trying to remove the remaining squares of sock. Even he looked aghast. I've never seen anything like it. He kept saying it. His accent sounded like the man with the hot dog cart back home. I've never seen anything like it. Father Clausen took us into a waiting room and swallowed an aspirin and told us that the grafted squares of sock didn't matter anyway. Now, I'm not a doctor, but if I've ever seen a clear-cut case for amputation, it was lying right in front of me ten minutes ago. Father Claussen sank into a chair and looked at my brother and I, thin and filthy, blotchy with heat rash, and covered with the scabs of bug bite,

scratched, bloody in the night. I could tell, by the way, he softened. that he pitied us. San Tomas has some of the best doctors in this part of the world. If your father's life is meant to be saved, these men will save it. The priest closed his eyes, and I knew he was seeing it again. Dad's rotting leg. I saw it, too. It was burned into the dark behind our eyelids.

He tightened his hold on the crucifix around his neck. Then he opened his eyes and looked at us, Sincerely, his voice was as soft as a whisper. Your father should not be alive. God is truly walking with this man. God may have been walking with Dad that day, but Dad himself would never walk again. The doctors found rot running all the way up to his hip, so that's where they amputated. The place where Dad's leg once met his pelvis was now just a concave socket that

size of a baby's head, with prickly stitches like long black caterpillars holding the skin in place. There was a tube in Dad's arm for morphine and fluids, one in his chest to pump antibiotics in, and another beneath the covers to pump other things out. Passed before Dad was conscious enough to speak. Father Claussen made arrangements for us to stay at a convent in San Tomas, where the nuns treated us like children. They did not know the things we had seen. When Dad started to come around, the doctor called Father Clausen, and he drove us from the convent to the hospital in his big green Buick. I stood beside Dad's bed so excited I began to cry. Dad opened his eyes, and then closed

them for so long I was afraid he'd drifted off again. But at last he broke the seal of scum. Some cementing his lips together. Where is it? Father Clausen looked at us, and we both shrugged our shoulders. Dad, we're here. Simon and I and Father Claussen, you're going to be all right. Rory's throat caught, and he glanced at the lopsided mound of blankets covering Dad's lower body. I mean, you're going to make it.

You're not going to die. Dad didn't say anything for a minute. I squeezed his hand. His head turned on his pillow, and he looked at me incredulously. Didn't you hear me ask you a question, son? I said, where the fuck is my goddamn leg? Back in the waiting room, the doctor with the accent and the bent scissors spoke to Father Claussen in a rapid rolling language.

Father Klausen looked at the floor with his hands clasped behind his back, nodding. When the doctor was finished, the father turned it to us and said, The doctors think that your father's fever has damaged part of his brain. I stammered, stunned, and confused, but Rourke was angry. His fists were tight balls at his sides. The problem with our dad was his leg, father. Or didn't you see it? Because I did.

My little brother sure did. A fever can't change a person that way. When I had the mumps, I was hot as a skillet for three days. Couldn't bear a stitch of clothing or spoonful of broth. And I didn't wake up a swearing blasphemer. Father Klausen nodded, still looking at the floor. This time with his hands clasped in front of him, he started to say something, then stopped as if he,

changed his mind about what to say. He started again carefully. Son, every part of a man is controlled by a specific part of his brain. When one part of the brain is damaged, he might forget how to walk, another part, and he forgets how to swallow or how to speak or how to read or write or do arithmetic. These doctors say that sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, a very special part of the brain gets hurt, and the person forgets what kind of person he is. They think that in your dad's case, the fever just burned that part of him away. Father Claussen put his hand on Rory's shoulder. May God be with you, boys. The church will do everything it can to help you and your father

through this trial. You must have faith. Rourke clenched his fists more tightly and shrugged out from under Father Claussen's hand. God had his chance, Father. And the church brought us to this Gomorrah to begin with. I don't think we'd like any help from either of you. In fact, I think my brother and I ought to be alone right now. He took me by the arm and began to turn away. This is a time for joining together in prayer, not for casting blame.

Rourke did not turn back. There is one more thing. Something in his voice made Rory stop. Your father says you won't leave here without his leg. A hospital bed had Dad's face, but nothing else about him was the same. When the nurses came to change his bandages, he waited until they were leaning over him before he tweaked their nipples through their smocks and asked if all the women from their country were. slots on wheels with titties of steel.

He held his fork with the wrong hand and laughed at things that weren't funny. He wanted to know where the fuck were his goddamn cigarettes, a wide filter, pall malls, as if he'd smoked them every day of his life. Even his breath smelled different. I know because right before we landed in Massachusetts, since he grabbed my collar and pulled me close. Those olive-eaten sawbones said they'd never seen the fucking bug I got.

He was so close I could feel hot breath in my nostrils. Said maybe it was the first time anyone got it, anywhere in the whole world. And I said, isn't that something to the good US of hay? Maybe have the fellas... the mayo, take a look at it, just so I can make sure to do my part. He smiled a smile that made his face dark. The sobone eyes real big.

You want to do my part to see this tragedy, don't befall another living soul. Not if I can... Sweetish breath into my face, and I recoiled. He yanked me fiercely back to him. It belongs to it's mine. You can't just toss someone's leg in the garbage like a used rubber. So they said, yeah. Point those brains at the Mayo are thinking up new medicine.

All the pills to stop your headache. Cure the clap. Even pills to make your dick guys may have something doing. So the sawbones trusted up in a... Big glass tube full of some that formaldehyde stuff, bigst. I saw him loading it into the cargo hole, the biggest, pickled pig's foot you ever saw. He laughed again. There was a rattle and a lurch as the landing gear deployed. We were back in Boston, but it didn't feel like home. Nothing was the same.

If those needle dicks and the mayo ever get their hands on it, it's mine. Dad pulled me so close, his nose touched the skin of my forehead, and his voice fell to a whisper that made my skin break into goose flesh. You hear me, son. It's mine! Mother Klausen had arranged a one-bedroom apart. for us on a sloppy street beside an Italian restaurant. It was close to St. Elizabeth's, the hospital where Dad could go if he needed to see a doctor.

And I mean the other sort of doctor, too. The psychiatrist. If he gets any worse, or if you boys are ever afraid he'll hurt you, just pick up the phone and call St. Elizabeth's right away. I've written the number to the psychiatric crisis line right here next to the phone. He also said the church would pay all of Dad's medical bills, so not to worry about that. And there was a Murphy bed in the living room, he told us there would be room for all of us as long as my brother and I shared a bed. He spoke a last hurried blessing, and then he left.

The apartment smelled like garlic bread and had nubby carpeting with gold and burgundy curly cues, like carpet from a movie theater lobby. There was something called a kitchenette, which was a half-sized icebox, a sink and a hot plate on an island of dingy linoleum that curled up where it met the carpet. Father Klausen said he chose this apartment because it had belonged to a man with polio.

The door that led in from the alley had a wide ramp and a rail for Dad's wheelchair, and above the bathtub and toilet were special bars where he could grab on if he needed to. The countertops in the kitchen and bathroom were only half as high as normal so he could reach everything. Dad sat in his wheelchair in the kitchenette, smoking pall malls and yelling slurs at the two black porters who had toted our luggage from the airport.

We didn't have much, mostly just second-hand clothes and dishes from the nuns in San Tomas. The pair of big men struggled up the wheelchair ramp with something heavy wrapped in black duvetine. They set it down in the corner and were wiping their brows when Dad yelled. You stupid, spooks! Are you going to put that right in front of the radiator? He dropped his cigarette in the sink and wheeled angrily across the room. Be careful. With that.

God damn it. Do you even know what that is? He yanked off the duveteen. Rory and I froze, staring, not believing. It's my goddamn leg. That's what it is. There it was. Dad's rotten leg, bobbing in size.

a glass tube as high as my shoulders. Steel caps closed the tube at the top and bottom, bolted tight with pieces that looked like chrome lug nuts. A paper with a big orange symbol that said biohazard stuck to the glass with strips of wrinkly white tape and a few paragraphs of medical words filled the space beneath the symbol. Beyond that, the gray mess of craters and boils floated like a fleshy jellyfish and the pale yellow preservative. Pocket watch. Good thing you darkies are hot for bribes and shiny things were in be halfway to Alabama by now.

On its way to be poked apart. With a microscope up his ass. Say what? One of the black men took a step toward Dad like he might hit him, but the other man touched his elbow and shook his head. and after that they both left and closed the door behind them. The lights in our new apartment were dimmed by puddles of dead moths settled in their yellowed fixtures. The fluorescent over the kitchenette flickered constantly like it was sucking its electricity through a bent straw.

There was not enough light or space or air. We all stood together in our new home, not speaking. me, my brother, my dad, and his preserved amputated leg, turned 17 that spring, and fibbed himself a year older so he could join the Navy. I cried and begged him not to leave, but he went anyway. He hugged me and told me he'd be back before I knew it, but he couldn't look me in the eye. And we both knew he was abandoning me. He was leaving me alone. with dad. Dad smoked cigarettes all day and watched game shows on TV. The Price is Right was his

favorite, he said, because when Bob Barker picked a pretty woman to guess the prices, you could see her tits bouncing as she ran down to the stage. It doesn't even have to be a pretty one. He lit a fresh cigarette off the old one. We mostly ate takeout from White Castle and Carl's Jr. But sometimes at the end of the month before Dad's disability check arrived, I'd use the hot plate to warm up food for us. Mostly frozen things, corn dogs, pizzas, Marie Callender's chicken pot pies in flimsy tins made of foil.

We'd eat off paper plates sitting at a card table we'd found folded up under Dad's bed. Once I'd tried to make beef stroganoff, but when the time came to eat it, I couldn't. I couldn't get past the thick gravy and the slippery noodles sliding over bits of meat. After the stroganoff, I had a hard time eating altogether. The feeling of chewed food churning around in my mouth made me sick to my stomach. I lost weight. I took long baths and showers. liking the feeling of scrubbed skin and the closed door between me and dad. In the afternoons,

I sat outside on the wheelchair ramp and pretended to read catalogs. From there, I could see people walking past on the sidewalk, but they couldn't see me. I saw the public school kids walking home from the bus stop and housewives on their way back from the baker and the butcher. Once I thought I saw the Irish girl walking past with a loaf of French bread. and a sack of tangerines, but I couldn't be sure it was her. I couldn't remember if I'd ever seen her face. I slept long nights on the piled mattresses of the Murphy bed. Dad's leg glowered from its pedestal, a wooden occasional table with one wobbly leg that Dad had made Rory and me drag in off the curb. He said the table would hold fine as long as we propped the broken leg with a stack of flat

to cigarette cartons, and it did. My dreams were bad and got worse as the summer wore on. The worst dream of all came on the night that it happened, the night after the 4th of July. I remember because it was right before the heat wave broke, you know, the bad one that tripped the grid and blacked out the entire east side. That night was the hottest night I'd seen since the chapel in the jungle. The apartment was stale and suffocating, and the reek of garlic and cigarettes and formaldehyde was everywhere.

I felt miserable and feverish even after I'd stripped to my underwear and cranked the knob on the window fan as far as it would go. My stomach gnawed as I lay sleepless, watching red digits on the clock radio in the kitchenette stack minutes into hours. It was a little past three when I heard a crack like a gunned. shot, a transformer shorting out. The fan blade stopped worrying and all the street lamps went dark. I'd never thought about how much light comes in through a person's windows, even with the curtains closed, but suddenly the whole apartment was black as pitch. The clock radio clicked into battery mode

and its red glow gave shape to the card table, the ice box, the world's biggest pickled pig's foot. I heard the door to Dad's room creak open telling me the Transformer had woken him too, and he would need a couple cigarettes and a spoonful of carnation and maybe half an hour on the toilet listening to his own satisfied grunts to soothe him back to sleep. The sound came from the hall like something catching or dragging on the carpet. I tried to climb out of bed to help, thinking he'd wedged his wheels against the baseboards again. But as always happens in nightmares, I found myself fixed flat on my back, paralyzed and numb. The dragging sound grew louder and closer.

I panicked, fear swarmed through me, and I screamed at my frozen muscles. Get up! Jesus, get up! But my arms and legs were too heavy or too weak or too tired. My eyes raced to the only scrap of light, the red glow. of the clock. And something was wrong. The light was all wrong. It wasn't doing something it usually did. It wasn't casting the right shadow on the linoleum. It wasn't casting the shadow of the leg. The leg was gone. The steel caps were still locked tightly in place, but nothing floated in the yellow preservative except a layer of fallen off bits that formed chunky sediment at the bottom of the

tube. The dragging came again, this time right next to the Murphy bed. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing hot tears between my eyelashes, and for the first time in a long time, my lips moved silently in frantic prayer. Slowly I rolled my eyes to the side of my eyes. Slowly I rolled my eyes to the side of my head and I saw it. The ghastly rotten leg, it was coming for me, sliding through the dark, using the rubbery remains of its toes to drag itself across the rough theater lobby carpet. Strings of flesh and the knob of jellied femur left a trail of preservative to show where it had been. And I could smell it, not the formaldehyde smell, but the smell from the smell. Beneath the palmettoes, the smell of maggots feasting on raw cheeseburgers, of flesh rotting in the tropical sun.

I felt a tug at the sheets and the exposed knuckle of the leg's big toe appeared above the mattress. I felt myself losing it, delirious with fear. Then came the second toe struggling over the hump, gripping the sheet like a monkey, to pull. itself up onto the mattress. The other toes followed as the leg slithered into bed with me. I gagged on the stedge and the fear and the feel of spongy flesh against my belly. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I was going to drown in fear. I shut my eyes and felt my heart thumped out one more massive helping of blood before everything went. bright white. And then I was awake. I leapt out of bed and wheeled around, sweeping my eyes to the

tube in the corner. It bobbed there innocently in the red glow as if to say, see, I've been right here the whole time. The blood rushed from my head and I dropped to my hands and knees weak. My ribs stood out from my chest as I breathed in and out. My heart skipped and started. I think I might have grayed out for a while. I was so tired, so tired, and so hungry and so weak. I looked up at the leg, hating it. I wanted everything back the way that it was. I wanted to walk into our old kitchen and find Dad standing on two feet in front of the stove,

flipping a batch of his famous hotcakes, and practicing aloud his sermon for the day. I wanted Rory, come back and make me believe I wasn't alone anymore. I wanted to sink my teeth into a hamburger or a banana or a slice of roast beef without feeling my tongue begin to explore its imaginary craters and boils. I just wanted to be rid of it. All of it. The tube was easier to break than you'd think. It really only took one good whack with the hot plate. to shatter the entire thing.

Dad heard the noise, of course, but he must have considered his own obvious limitations because he didn't even try to pull me off. He screamed curses at me from his wheelchair, and when that didn't work, he dialed the number Father Klausen had written next to the phone. Then you guys came, and you brought me here. At first you strapped me to the bed,

but I got that privilege back for good behavior. I'm not sure how long it took you guys to arrive after Dad called. I don't really remember that part at all. I expect it probably took longer than usual on account of the blackout. All I remember is a terrible throbbing urgency to have Dad back. The real Dad, the Dad, the Dad who'd made us pancakes and hated him. the smell of ash trays and who stood sweating before a tribe of villagers intent only on the word of God. The dad who'd said in a voice I can now recall only as an echo. Take and eat. This is

my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. It's time to rest on our dark journey. journey, we thank you for joining us. If you would like to find out how you can hear the full-length versions of our audio program, please visit the no-sleeppodcast.com to learn about our season past program, 25 episodes, each over two hours long, and three exclusive bonus episodes, all for only 1999. On behalf of everyone at the No Sleep Podcast, we thank you for listening. Join us again next week, when the journey resumed. its descent into the sleepless night. This audio production is copyright

2017-2018 by Creative Reason Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. No duplication or reproduction of this audio program is permitted without the written consent of Creative Reason Media, Inc.