The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S3E10

Episode Date: September 22, 2013

It's episode 10 of Season 3! We have five tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about strange visitors, tormented bodies, and unholy visitors.The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first two tales. "Heat Stroke" written by Kevin Thomas and read by Peter Lewis. (Story starts at 00:03:50)"Olivia" written by William Dalphin and read by David Cummings & Jenni Higginbotham. (Story starts at 00:15:50)"The Sleep Clinic" written by The Claverhouse Email Series and read by James Cleveland. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:29:55)"Daycare" written by L Chan and read by Elle Hama. (Story starts at 00:48:15)"What Stays Behind" written by Richard Steed and read by David Cummings. (Story starts at 01:09:50)Click here to learn more about Peter LewisClick here to learn more about Kevin ThomasClick here to learn more about William DalphinClick here to learn more about The Claverhouse Email SeriesClick here to learn more about L Chan  Podcast produced by: David CummingsMusic & Sound Design by: David Cummings, unless otherwise notedThis podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons License 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the sunlight fades to darkness, the frightful tales creep into your mind. There will be no sleep. And now things listening. There's little boys in the window. Brace yourself for the no sleep podcast. It's episode 10 of season three. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Cummings.

We have five tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about strange visitors, tormented bodies, and unholy visitors. I have been really encouraged lately because there has been a noticeable upswing in the number of new listeners to the show. It may be because of the attention we garnered from the Parsec Awards, or maybe it's because you longtime listeners have been telling others about the show. If you are a new listener to the podcast who came on board in the past couple of weeks, I extend a warm welcome to you. I hope you continue to enjoy the spooky tales from our great authors and narrators.

Whether you're a new or seasoned listener, I want to mention the ways in which you can help out to promote the show and grow our audience. I realize that for some podcasts, there is a mention in every episode about how listeners should like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and leave a review on iTunes. Those are great ways to help out, but I try not to dwell on those details too often. I do want our new listeners to know that it makes a huge difference to us if you can spread the word about the show via social networking and also by telling your family and friends. Encourage them to visit the no sleeppodcast.com.

There's a link at the top of the site entitled New to No Sleep. That gives them some suggestions about episodes they can listen to in order to give them a taste of what we have to offer. It's a great way to show others about the kind of entertainment we provide. So, to sum up, please like us, follow us, review us, share us, blog us, link us, work us, and hell, even twerk us. And to thank you for helping out, I'm going to start the show. In our first tale, we meet a man who has allowed his body to get in a very precarious situation. Before long, he finds that he is in peril in more ways than one. Author Kevin Thomas shares his story about the physical effects of being too hot.

And Peter Lewis reads the tale as we discover just how we can't. important it is to avoid heat stroke. In the first stages of heat stroke, you get a headache. It's serious business. It sounds like the single pansiest way anyone could ever get hurt, but it's actually potentially lethal. Medically, it's defined as the body's core temperature reaching over 105 degrees Fahrenheit. In less clinical terms, your body is literally breaking down in the heat.

You are burning alive. just too slowly for your stupid ass to save yourself. It's a sneaking killer, too, and knowing the signs is half the battle. I didn't, which is why there was a patient Japanese man trying his best to understand my hushed, breathy pleading as I lay in the first aid tent at a music festival in Osaka. But it wasn't the headache that concerned me most, nor even the vomited mixture of Aquarius rehydration drink and Onigiri rice triangle on the floor, No, my most pressing worry was the tall, fat, shadowy figure, pressed so hard against the

outside of the reed walled tent that it looked like he was starting to bleed between the gaps. It troubled me more that no one else appeared to see him. In the second stage of heatstroke, your skin flushes red. It had been the cue that did it, that fucking cue, coupled with my own rushing, stupidity. To get to the festival's site, you had to take a train to a fairly small station on one of Osaka's smaller artificial islands. This was a part of the metro designed to be shared by a few tourists and the working locals who resented them, not the upwards of 10,000 excitable teenagers now pouring through. It heaved and pulsed with the weight of a crowd that flowed

like a slow, deep river through the corridors towards the exit. But that wasn't the worst of it. The train and station, or at least air-conditioned, the worst came next. Upon exiting the station, you were greeted by banks of coaches taking people to the festival site. They were tantalizingly close, so close you could feel the exhaust fumes sticking to your sweat, slicked skin. But they too had their own cue, a queue that went over the road and then snaked endlessly through unused car parks before doubling back to the buses. It was an unrelenting sea of tarmac and nothing to do but shuffle along in the baking sun. In the next stage of heat stroke, you feel nauseous and may vomit.

It was hot, so fucking hot. It was a heat you felt with your feet, even through the thick soles of my walking boots, a depressingly adult and sensible choice of footwear for the situation. I could feel the heat burning from the ground into my toes. It was at that time that the first hints of headache started to set in. Right then, I should have been downing more water and getting into the shade, but in true idiot fashion I was more worried about missing the opening act, a J-pop band called Scandal for whom I'd mostly bought the day ticket.

Two hours. Two hours of painfully slow progress across the vast plain of hot, black, bubbling tar. My headache worsened. I started to feel nauseous, but still I plowed on drinking a rich, sugary rehydration drink that only worsened the nausea and tried to come back up several times before staying down. It was approaching midday by the time we arrived at the buses. The brief journey to the site in the air-conditioned bus did little to improve my condition. In the next stage of heatstroke, your body ceases to sweat, and skin is hot and dry to the

touch. But it was when I arrived that I did the stupidest thing of the day. Spurred on by a sudden burst of energy for finally arriving and knowing that scandal were already halfway through a set, I ran to the mountain stage. I ran, I fucking ran with my symptoms. I should have been seeking medical attention. I should have been on my back in a cool and shaded room sipping cold water and waiting for my body to start sweating again. Instead, I was running through the midday August sun in 104 degree heat to catch a fucking band. Through the remainder of their set, I was getting more nauseous and busy. My skin was heating up.

My heart was beating faster. I just kept on jumping to the songs. I thought I was getting lost in the beat, lost in the music, lost in the moment. Truth is, I was just getting lost. With the loudness of the music, I didn't notice just how much my grip on everything was slipping. In the next stage of heat stroke, your heart increases dramatically and breathing becomes rapid. By the time the set was over, I was borderline delirious.

It was only then I decided to find help. The heat now felt like a wrap of crinkled, scorching aluminum inside my skull. It cracked and pinched and burned and shot tiny little jolts of the heat. pain throughout my body. Efforts to drink more resulted in instant vomiting. I'd long sense stopped sweating. The fact that I was still vertical was nothing short of amazing. Through the fuzzy blur of my increasingly disorientated vision, I saw a red cross on a tent flag. In the next stage of heat stroke, delirium sets in. It can be difficult to focus or follow conversations, and hallucinations and seizures can follow.

I barely managed to say a word to the Japanese man who greeted me at the door to the tent. I could only say please, and pathetically gesture towards the beds surrounded by fans. If he didn't understand my words, he understood the look on my flushed face and quickly helped me to one of the beds.

I lay down as my grip on reality threatened to come totally undone. My little Japanese savior had applied a cold, wet towel to my forehead and a sad, A savage cramp heaved the contents of my stomach onto the floor, into a strangely brown and gray puddle of half-digested rice. It was now that I simply allowed the creeping tendrils of delirium to start entwining themselves in my synapses. Outside, the next act were taking the stage, and a heavy drumbeat was all I could perceive. That was when I saw him, standing there motionless, staring at me.

A tall, fat figure, an impossible shadow standing freely in the midday sun. He was beating a drum like a soldier keeping a marching beat for a dead army. In the next stage of heatstroke, confusion sets in, and people can become disorientated. My heart raced. My breathing, shallow and rapid. The shadow took a couple of steps closer to the wall of the tent. The drum beat continued. The first aid assistant replaced the now-heeded towel on my forehead.

He said something like drip. The shadow paused momentarily before continuing his slow, shuffling march to the wall. When he reached the wall, he pressed into it. The wall gave and swayed with his invisible weight. Why couldn't anyone see it? Why couldn't the guy softly dabbing my forehead with wet cloth see the six feet of nothing? trying to pass through the wall at our feet. The shadow leant and pushed and sank into the wall until he started to bleed through.

Inky tendrils snaked and slithered around and felt their way through the gaps in the reed wall. With organic independence, they snaked through before entwining themselves in each other again. What was once one shadow became a thousand creeping vines before becoming one again. The drumbeat continued. Then all at once, he was at the foot of the bed. I tried to scream, but everything was just a dry burn. I looked up at the first aider and tried to plead with him to do something, but the words burned on my tongue.

He just kept looking down at me with that immovably soothing smile. I couldn't make a sound as the shape put his black oil hands on my feet. They burned. Hot or cold, I couldn't tell, but they burned. My feet were encased in shadow and the blackness started up my legs, spreading like infected veins. I could barely see, I couldn't speak, I couldn't think. The Japanese man replaced my cold compress, oblivious to the creeping void encasing my lower legs. Everything burned.

A dry, fierce, stabbing burn, a burn that transcended temperature. something else. The black nothingness carried on, coating my body. Tendrils of nothing kept up their relentless progress over my stomach and chest before wrapping around my neck like a noose. Soon the leading tendrils scraped at my eyes, and my whole body was not there.

It was only once the blackness seeped into my mouth like a choking, crude oil that my grasp on consciousness finally slipped. And I let go. The final stage of heat stroke is unconsciousness, coma, and then death. Up a day later in a hospital bed. An IV drip in my arm and a cold flannel on my forehead. My skin was still damp with sweat and the bed sheets were soaked. Once the drip had rehydrated me, my body flushed my whole sweat system to be sure.

It was another day before they were certain no long-term. damage was done and I was allowed to leave. Still, I could have been wrong, but I'm sure, on that final walk out of the hospital and into the hot mid-afternoon sun, I saw a brief shadow out of the corner of my eye standing near the wall. I bought a bottle of cold water. Heat stroke. It's serious business. After losing a dear friend, a man finds himself struggling to make sense of what has happened. Author William Delphin explains how the man copes with the events described in the last letter he received from her. Jenny Higginbotham and I will read the tale for you about what this man learned about what it was that tormented his friend,

A woman named Olivia. I received a troubling letter in the mail the other day. It was from my friend Olivia. The thing is, I'm flying out in just a few days to attend her funeral. The reasons for her death are kind of complicated, made more so by the contents of her letter. I thought I understood why she chose to take her life. But after reading her last letter to me, I just don't know anymore.

You might be wondering why Olivia would write to me. What relationship did we have? We were best friends back in high school, and that's really about it. Call it cowardice on my part that I never officially told her how I felt. Maybe deep down she knew, but didn't want to love her. lose what we had. I was fine with that. We remained best friends, even when college moved us hundreds of miles apart. Even when she met the love of her life, a guy named Greg. She wrote me every week, and I wrote back. We both graduated. She and Greg got an apartment out east. I briefly moved back in with my folks

while searching for a job, but through it all. Every week I got a letter from Olivia, and a day later I'd mail one back. Last month, Olivia called me. I knew before even picking up the phone that something was wrong. She would never have called me unless she was in serious trouble or distress and needed someone special to talk to. She was barely understandable. through the sobbing and the bursts of crying. Please. I wanted to be there. I wanted to hold her and comfort her.

Maybe a little deep down, I thought, and I feel guilty now for this, that it was my chance to show her I was the right guy for her. Let her latch on to you, I thought. This is a sign. What an ass. I was to think such a thing. But I couldn't go.

I had just started a new job and had no time off available yet, nor money to spend to get there. I explained it to her, and she said she understood. But I could hear the despair in her voice, and I felt like I was at a turning point in our friendship, where she would never rely on me again. Maybe if I had tried to find a way, begged my boss for an advance on vacation time, or risk just calling in sick for a couple days. If I had borrowed money from my parents, or just hopped in the car and drove the 18 hours to get there. Maybe if I had done any of those things, she'd still be alive. But I know it's wrong to blame myself for her.

her death. If the letter she wrote told me anything, it was that Olivia had problems, a visit from me would not solve. Dear Preston, by the time you receive this, I expect to be gone. I can't live like this anymore. You're my best friend and I love you more than anything, which is why I hope you will read this with an open mind. Everything I'm about to tell you is the absolute truth. I am the reason that Greg is dead. When the police interviewed me that night, I told them that we had been out on the roof, drinking and stargazing. I had been lying down on a blanket, and he had gotten up to go get some more drinks from a cooler we had placed on the ledge. I wasn't watching, but I saw Greg tip over the edge of the roof and then heard his yelling as he fell, and that was all.

I lied. We had been out stargazing that night, but after a couple of drinks, Greg asked me about you. One of your letters had arrived that day in the mail and Greg had found it. The truth is, I had kept our correspondence a secret because Greg could get very jealous. And he did get jealous. He started accusing me of cheating on him and wanted to know who you were. I told him we were old friends from school, but he didn't believe me. Thinking I was lying, he got physical. He grabbed me by the wrist and shook me, yelling accusations and calling me a whore. He'd been drinking way too much. I was scared, Preston. I pressed him away from me and meant to run inside, but he stumbled backward and went over the edge of the roof. I couldn't believe it. I heard him scream,

You bitch! Just at the moment after he went over, and then the sound of him hitting the sidewalk. I was frozen. I didn't know what to do. I had just killed Greg by accident. You're the only person now who knows this, what you do with that information is your choice. I'm so sorry. But it doesn't end there, Preston, because this is the part where I'm begging you to keep an open mind. Ever since that night, I've seen Greg. At first I chalked it up to the guilt I've been feeling, for pushing him, for lying about it. I thought I was hallucinating, but I think the reality is that Greg blames me for his death, and he's tormenting me for it. My sister Judy came out to help me get through things for the first week after Greg died.

I wish it had been you, Preston, but maybe it's good that it wasn't. The second night we were watching television in the dark. Judy was sitting with me, one arm around me, and I was wrapped up in an old blanket. I heard a sound from outside, like a rubber wiper blade being dragged down the glass. I asked Judy if she'd heard it. And she said she didn't. I went to the window to look outside. The street was dark, and mostly all I saw was my own reflection.

But I also saw Greg. He was upside down. His face was so pale. I knew he was dead. There wasn't a moment where I thought Greg's alive. I saw him in the window hanging upside down almost directly in front of me. And I knew that even though I saw him, and he was looking directly at me, that he was dead. It was only for maybe three seconds, but I have it burned forever into my memory.

Even now as I write this, I can close my eyes and see him glaring at me through the window that night. They never let me see his body, but I can tell you what he looked like after he fell, because that was the way he looked as he hovered in front of my window that night. His face was swollen and half of it seemed lopsided. One of his eyes was sunken in, and it looked like there was blood coming out of his mouth. His hair was all wet looking and matted together. I screamed when I saw him. Judy ran over and asked me what was wrong, but by then he was gone,

and all I had was the after image of his face in my mind. It was so sudden that I honestly thought afterward that I was going insane. I saw him again on the day of his wake. Judy drove us to the funeral home. I used the mirror and the sun visor to adjust my makeup, and when I looked, Greg's face was right behind me, staring at me angrily. He looked close enough that for a moment,

I thought I could feel his breath on my neck. Please believe me, Preston, I was not hallucinating. He looked worse than the first time I saw him. His skin was black and purplish like a bruise, and orangey yellow in some places. He lingered there, staring me directly in the eyes. I couldn't blink or look away. I sat there, looking horrified at him, until I could finally muster up the strength to scream. I scared Judy so badly, we nearly went off the road.

I had to grab the door handle for a moment, and in that instant when I looked away, he was gone. I told Judy that I'd seen him, but she said what anyone would say, that I imagined it because I was still getting used to him being gone. He's not gone, Preston. Since then, I've started seeing him every day. I can't look outside because I see him right outside the window. Sometimes he's looking in. Sometimes he seems to be falling past as if in slow motion, kicking his arms and legs out. I've seen him standing behind me.

when I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, his flesh gray and hair falling out in clumps. Even when I moved my toiletries into the kitchen, I could see a dark form standing behind me in the reflection of the faucet. I woke up one morning and there was matted blood on the pillow where he used to sleep. I sleep on the couch now in front of the television. I leave the TV on now, because if it's off, I can see him in the reflection, standing right in front of me or hovering over me. several feet off of the floor with his limbs flailing. If I'm not actually insane, he's driving me there.

He hates me so much, Preston. I see it in his eyes. Even as his face becomes more and more decayed and disfigured, his eyes remain clear and focused and full of anger. I think he must blame me for his death. I know I do. I can't get away from him. He's waiting, torturing me,

daring me to die. I've tried almost everything I can think of to make him stop haunting me. This is why I've decided to do what I'm about to do. I'm already dying inside. I wish you were here for me to tell you in person, but then again, you'd probably just try to stop me. All I hope is that you believe me, that and that death will free me from the hold he's got over me. I'll never forget you, Preston. Please don't ever forget me. I'm sorry. Love, Olivia.

Now you can see why I'm not entirely sure what to think. I wanted to say that I don't believe in life after death, but I do. I found myself trembling after I finished reading her letter. I've read it several times since then. I keep it in my filing. cabinet with all her other letters. The worst part is the day she killed herself, the day she popped an entire bottle of pills and lay down on her bed and never woke up. I thought I saw her. I was at work. I've got a

cubicle next to a window, and I noticed someone standing outside the building looking up in my direction. I thought, that looks like Olivia. And my heart raced for a second at how much the woman looked just like her. I even wondered if maybe she was visiting her family and had come to see me as a surprise. I stood up, looked out the window again, and the woman was gone. Maybe she'd just been a stranger passing by and looking up at a random window. Or maybe it was Olivia, come to say goodbye and to warn me that there is something afterlife, and you can't escape it. Our episode has come to an end.

Thank you for spending time with us at the No Sleep Podcast. If you would like to learn how you can hear the full-length version of this episode, featuring many more stories, please visit the no sleeppodcast.com and click on the season pass link. Purchasing a season pass will help support everyone who contributes to the podcast, and in return you'll get 25 full-length episodes and three exclusive bonus episodes, all for only 1999. This is David Cummings.

Thank you for listening, and join you. us again for the next episode of the No Sleep Podcast.