The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S4E08

Episode Date: September 7, 2014

It's episode 8 of Season 4. We have six tales for you in this episode featuring stories about creepy creatures and surreal strangers. The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first two tales.  "Still Waters" written by The Claverhouse Email Series and read by David Ault. Music by Kerry Kelso. (Story starts at 00:05:15) "Torso" written by Brighid NicGarran and read by David Cummings, Jon Reeder, and Rima Chaddha Mycynek. (Story starts at 00:24:45) "Dolls" written by Greg Ryder and read by Mark Copeland. (Story starts at 00:44:10) "Dinner By Swamp Light" written by William Dalphin and read by David Cummings. (Story starts at 00:53:00) "Witness Protection" written by Alex White and read by Corinne Sanders & David Cummings. (Story starts at 01:19:50) "Method Acting" written by Matt Dymerski and read by Peter Lewis, David Cummings, & Tisha Boone. (Story starts at 01:38:20) Click here to learn more about The Claverhouse Email Series Click here to learn more about David Ault Click here to learn more about Jon Reeder Click here to learn more about Brighid NicGarran Click here to learn more about William Dalphin Click here to learn more about Matt Dymerski Podcast produced by: David Cummings Music & Sound Design by: David Cummings & Brandon Boone, unless otherwise noted The NoSleep Podcast uses the PSE Hybrid Library exclusively for its sound design. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons License 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sunlight fades to dark. The freight freight. To give it to your fear, there will be the no sleep pot. I lost track of time as the year wore on. I knew we were balanced precariously on the very edge of reality, between madness and sanity. There were lots of workers that got maimed and stuff, right? And this one guy, he was walking by one of the big ones,

got pulled in and ripped the pieces before anyone could help him. Sometimes my mother would hear her say things, and she'd always tell us to never. Ever, ever take her up on her offer and go inside of her house. Was it a person? It looked like a person, man-sized, broad from the top all the way to the bottom. Fear struck my body and I began to shake. He knows.

He knows that I found out the truth. Once the air ran out, we began suffocating. But thankfully, about 15 seconds later, the concept of breathing wind, too. It's episode 8 of season four. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Cummings. We have six tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about creepy creatures and surreal strangers. Well, if you haven't already heard the news, I am proud to announce that the No Sleep podcast has won the 2014 Parsec Award for the Best Anthology Podcast. This is the most prestigious award a speculative fiction podcast can win,

so I'm thrilled that we've been given this honor. Last year we were awarded the Best New Podcaster Award, which is akin to the Rookie of the Year Award. This year, we've won the equivalent of the MVP Award. At the risk of making a cliched Oscar winner's speech, I will simply say that I am so thankful for all the tremendous talent and hard work that so many people put into the show. From my musical collaborator, Brandon Boone, to the many stalwart narrator such as Peter Lewis, Jessica McAvoy, Corinne Sanders, Elle Bentley, and Nicole Doolin, among others, to the great authors who regularly share their tales with us.

Writers like Michael Whitehouse, who was nominated for one of his short stories this year, just as Andrew McDougal was. The works of writers like Anton Scheller, Milos Boggetich, Chance Patrick, H. K. Reyes, Cliff Barlow, C.K. Walker, Kelsey Donald, I could go on and on. I will also add three authors who have contributed much to the podcast, including three stories on this episode. William Delphin, Matt Dimerick, and the great Claverhouse email series have all meant so much to the success of the show. So a big thanks to all who contribute, and of course to all of you for listening and supporting the show.

We move on and look forward to many great things to come. One of the strengths of this podcast is the strong sense of community we foster, and by welcoming new contributors on a regular basis. We have a number of newcomers joining us this week. Narrators David Alt, John Reeder, and Mark Copeland are making their first appearances on the show. David Alt is a gifted actor and scientist. You know, those things often go together, right? Make sure you check out the links and the show notes to find out more about our new narrators and authors. Also making his first appearance with us is musician Carrie Kelso. Carrie will be adding

his composing skills to the show by sharing his dark, ambient sounds with us. We welcome Carrie and look forward to more of his work in the future. So there you have it, a new award, new narrators, and a new musician. It all adds up to an exciting new year ahead for us. And make sure you keep listening to each episode because I will soon be making a monumental announcement that will mark the most exciting change the podcast has ever had. It's coming soon, so stay tuned.

Now, let's start the show. I mean, the award-winning show. In our first tale, we find a man who is about to take a big step. Sadly, it's a step off of a bridge to his doom. But as we learn from another story from the Claverhouse Email series, this man meets a mysterious stranger who offers him an alternative to his final decision. narrator David Alt reads the tale for us as we learn that so often in life what goes around comes around and it's something you learn as you hover above the still waters.

They say your life flashes before your eyes before you die. Well, mine didn't. At least not literally. But maybe suicide doesn't count. All I remember going through my head as I stood. on the parapet of the bridge and gazed down into the inky black waters beneath was a deep sense of resignation. I'd been over and over everything in my head thousands of times already. All that was left was just that one single step. Just put one foot in front of the other like I'd been doing my entire life.

The cool night air felt fresh and cooled against my face, like the farewell kiss of a long-lost love. I closed my eyes and raised a foot into the empty air in front of me. And that's when I hesitated. Hesitated just long enough for my life to take a very different turn. A dry, sardonic laugh echoed through the night. A kind of world-weary chuckle that suffocated the seriousness of my intent in an instant. I opened my eyes and turned around. A figure was idling towards me out of the darkness.

His tone was breezy and light. I did my best to ignore him, but he walked up and sat himself down on the wall beside me, facing into the bridge. He took out a small pouch and began rolling himself a cigarette. Halfway through the process, he looked up at me sideways, his eyes glinting in the orange streetlights. So, has things.

I stared down at him. Just peachy, thanks. He laughed again. Yeah, looks like it. His nimble fingers produced a toothpick thin cigarette, which he licked and lit with the dexterity of a stage magician. He took a long, deep drag, then exhaled a thick plume of smoke out into the night.

The silence stretched out between us like thick toffee. Eventually I couldn't stand it any longer. Look, I don't want to talk about it, and you can't do anything to help me, so you might as well leave and let me get on with it. Fair enough, I'm not exactly a good listener anyway. Right, right. Good, good. He took another drag, letting the smoke hang for a moment in the empty air. But how about you do something for me first?

Now it was my turn to give a little laugh. For you? Like what? Oh, it's pretty simple, really. You just give me a year of your life. A year of my life? Is there an echo out here? You're crazy. Yeah.

Says the guy about to take the shortest swim of his life. What have you got to lose? You'd be master of your own life so far, and where has that led you? To this one-off, high-dive performance. for an audience of one. He grinned, his eyes twinkling from beneath his shaggy, unkempt hair. You don't want it anymore, so give it to me for just one year. Is this some kind of sex slave thing or something?

A deep chuckle reverberated across the bridge. No, no, nothing like that. You place your life in my keeping for 12 months. After that, we park company and you've been. You can do whatever you want. Your life is your own again. And if you want to come back here, well, that's entirely up to you. He threw his cigarette over his shoulder, and I watched it spiral down to the rushing water below. Just one year. No time at all, considering you're a long time dead. I still think you're insane. Why should I trust you? He grinned.

You, my friend, are a good judge of character. He reached into his pocket and, pulled something out, holding it out to me in his closed fist. Call this your insurance policy. I sat down beside him on the wall of the bridge, legs dangling over the river beneath, and put my outstretched palm under his fist. He opened his hand, and something small but reassuringly heavy dropped into mine.

It was a tiny, double-barreled revolver, inlaid in silver with a pearl handle. He looked old and well-worn. It's a derringer, I'm told it's an antique. I turned it over in my hand. Careful, it's loaded. Try it. I pointed it down into the water and pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp crack, and the tiny weapon jumped in my hand as a bullet splashed into the river. One shot left. That's your get-out-of-jail-free card. It'll save you the drive back here if you ever want out of the deal at any deal. time. And if you worried about me doing you a mischief, well, that's your security right there. You're holding all the aces. So what's it going to be? I felt the weight of the tiny pistol in my hand as I considered this strange suggestion. A brand new life for a year, free from everything that had driven me here in the first place. It could be like being born again. I'd already walked out on my old life. Why not start anew? And it was true. I'd fucked up. I'd fucked up. I'd fucked up. I'd

up royally on my own terms, so why not live my life on someone else's for a while? I turned to the wild-eyed stranger and raised the barrels of the miniature gun squarely to his forehead. He was right. I did have nothing to lose. A wide grin broke across his face and a twinkle of something like anticipation danced in his eyes. I think we have a deal, I said, pocketing the revolver and striding away from the bridge. There's an old Chinese curse I've always liked. It just says, may you live in interesting times, my life certainly got more interesting from that night on. My mysterious benefactor, if you could call him that, was unlike anyone else I had ever met. He showed me that beneath the surface of things,

behind the veneer of humdrum normality that most people work hard to lose themselves in on a day-to-day basis, there's another, deeper world lurking in the cracks and the shadows that is unlike anything you've ever experienced. My newfound friend and I traveled to all the secret corners of the world and met people who seemed to straddle the boundaries between what was real and what was otherworldly. In those 12 months, we lived every possible kind of life you can imagine. We dallied with the drunks and down and outs in the nether realms of New York. rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous on the streets of Monte Carlo, and even lived for a time in a weather-beaten croft in the remote and desolate highlands of Scotland. My companion seemed to know everyone, and could open doors into areas that I never even knew existed.

He seemed to exist on the margins of reality. He was certainly insane, that much was certain, but his insanity was infectious, and he introduced me to countless other strange and unique individual. around the world. It would be too easy to dismiss it all as a kind of madness, a shared foliardur, which my companion inculcated in me while I was in an emotional and vulnerable state. That's the kind of explanation the old me would have put on things, so I could tidy those experiences away in a neat little box

and not have to think about them too much. But one of the things I learned, perhaps the most enduring lesson that I'll take with me to my grave, is the fact that perception is reality. Those dark, creeping things that we faced in the moonlight in Sri Lanka, the shape-shifting miasma that we cornered in a back alley off Wall Street, even the nightmarish entity that almost stole away both our minds in the toilets of that illegal club in Munich, though they might not seem possible in your world,

their existence is as real to be now as the ground beneath my feet. I still bear the scars, both physical and mental. Whenever I asked my companion about himself or his life before we met, all he would give me was a tight-lipped little grin. I'm just another pilgrim, he'd say, a fellow traveller, just like you. Eventually I stopped asking. In the end, it didn't really matter. I'd close the door on my old life the moment I walked off that bridge,

and now everything was a voyage of discovery. There didn't seem any point in looking backwards, not when every day held such challenging and testing new experiences for me. It was all I could do to keep up with him. I felt like a tightrope walker, afraid to stop and look down for fear of falling. I lost track of time as the year wore on. I knew we were balanced precariously on the very edge of reality,

between madness and sanity. and I knew we were playing a very dangerous game. Even as I was exploring these new realms that my companion opened up for me, I think I always knew that things were destined not to end well. You can't play fast and loose with the rules of reality like we did and not expected to come back one day and kick you in the face. Eventually it was the turn of the seasons that reminded me of our deal. The sting of winter was gathering in the air again,

and the derringer seemed to weigh more heavily in my pocket than ever. And all the time we'd spent together, it had never left my side. I began to think about what would happen once the year was up. Would we just go our separate ways? Would I be left to fend for myself again, knowing what I knew and having seen what I'd seen? There was no returning to my old life, that was for sure. Those days already felt like the memory of some half-remembered dream.

I was suddenly very aware of time passing. My companion seemed to grow more and more distant as the days rolled on. Did he have a plan for when the year was over? Was he hatching another mad scheme with me at the center of it? Or maybe it was just me. Maybe as the deadline drew closer, I was getting paranoid. My newly attuned senses were picking up on things that simply weren't there. Still, I began to look on my friend.

with new eyes. He'd always been secretive by nature, and now I began to read a dark intent into his every move. I'd seen him be callous, even brutal in the way he dealt with people, and I knew how easily he could turn on a whim and throw my world upside down. He was a man of his word, but once our deal was done, there was no telling what he might have in store for me. We returned to my hometown without a word said between us about the looming deadline. The old streets that had once been my home seemed peopled by sinister shadows and malicious whispers that died away before I could catch them. The place was utterly alien to me now, like a cheap stage set full of bad bit part actors.

It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach to be back there again. My companion appeared to grow more distant with each passing day. He seemed flat and uncommunicative. And my growing fear and suspicion filled his silences with unspoken yet sinister motives. It got so that I could hardly bear to be around him. His very presence began to feel threatening to me, and his unpredictable and eccentric nature, which I had once found so intriguing,

now only instilled in me a growing sense of dread. I became convinced that I had to do something, and do it soon before the year was up. A kind of heavy malignancy seemed to hang in the air, tainting everything it touched. The tension was almost unbearable. We were driving back to the bridge in his van when things finally came to a head. He wouldn't say that that's where we were going, but the streets themselves seemed to lead us there with an eerie inevitability.

It was a year to the day since we'd struck our little deal, and as the time ticked on, I grew moment. more uncomfortable by the second. Pull over. My voice sounded thin and wavering against the low growl of the band's ancient engine. He looked over at me with something like resignation in his cold blue eyes. The van slid to a halt and a small layby on the outskirts of town. And so he come full circle, he muttered under his breath. I took the derringer from my pocket and again pointed it squarely at his forehead. He looked ridiculous in my oversized hand, like a child's toy, that something in my manner must have conveyed the seriousness of my intentions. He shut off the engine. Get out of the van,

I said, still without a clue as to what I was going to do next. Without a word, he opened the door and slid out of his seat. I followed, the cold night air washing over me like icy water. We faced each other by the side of the road, the lights of the city twinkling in the background. So now what? As ever, he seemed entirely unfazed by this new development. I was about to ask you the same question. That was always your problem. Too many questions. You find answers in the doing of things, not in asking questions.

What does that even mean? I was getting flustered while he remained cool as a cucumber. Look, I want to know what you've got planned for me, where we go from here. How should I know? You get your life back. What you do with it is entirely up to you. Somehow, I doubt it that. But how could you do that?

Just walk away after everything we've seen, everything you've showed me. He shruged. What were you expecting? Some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? There is no end point, no goal. things just continue on and what goes around comes around. Yeah, thanks for that, Yoda. That's cleared things up knowing.

He gave a tired little half-smile. I think deep down we both already know how this is going to pan out. Let me force your hand. He reached into his pocket, and in an instant my heart was in my mouth. Don't move. You'll be needing these. He threw something towards me. I caught a glimps.

of metal in the fading twilight. Did I mean to pull the trigger? I honestly don't know. It all happened in an instant. The crack of the pistol sounded obscenely loud coming from that dainty little toy of a gun, but the bullets somehow found its mark despite my trembling hand, and the man who had been my constant companion for the last twelve months instantly crumpled to the ground. I looked down to see what he had thrown at me. Two bullets for the derringer. lay in the dirt by my feet. I dragged his body into some bushes by the side of the road and sat in the van to think. I rolled myself a cigarette to calm my nerves. As the van filled with smoke, I loaded up the gun with the two bullets I'd been given. I sat there for a very long time.

The loaded gun cradled in my hand. Eventually I came to a decision. I put the gun back in my pocket, started up the van and drove out to the bridge. The place, where it all began. Maybe my companion had been right. Things should turn full cycle. The events of the last year cycled round and round in my head. There was no way I could go back to living a normal humdrum life, not after everything I'd seen. There was simply no place for me in that world anymore. Everything had lost its luster. When your only choice is no choice, you just do what has to be done. I pulled up at the bridge, and got out of the van. Walking towards the parapet, I felt empty and numb, like a machine just going through the motions. Then I stopped dead in my tracks. There was a figure already standing

there, framed in the cheap neon glow of the streetlight, gazing down into the still waters below. Just another pilgrim, a fellow traveller. I let out a dry, sardonic laugh and walked towards him, My fingers lightly caressing the derringer in my pocket. After all, when you think about it, a year is not really a long time at all, is it? When a group of friends get together for a late-night session of drinks and scary movies, it doesn't take long before their adventurous spirits are stirred by a local urban legend. Author Brie Negeran tells us about how their search for proof of a ghost in an abandoned building leads to far more horror than they anticipated.

Narrators John Reeder and Rima Chathamisenik join me as we read the story about a spirit who doesn't have much of a body left. In fact, all you might end up finding is a torso. So have you heard of this thing called the torso ghost? Gary lulled his head over the back of the couch, half empty beer bottle in hand, while Renee sat on the floor and fiddled with her digital camera. It was a typical Friday night. None of us had much of anything to do, so cheap beer and campy horror movies were the order of the evening.

By midnight, we'd all be half drunk and scaring each other silly with whatever weird story we could think up or pull from the internet. I shook my head. No, is that a new one? Uh, sort of. I found it on that urban legend site last week. Actually, it has to do with that old warehouse past the docks. You know, that one that used to make bombs and stuff. We did know that place. Everyone did.

It was a hotbed of local rumor and paranormal tales. There had been a number of accidents there during the building's tenure as a munitions factory, and a plaque bearing the names of a few dozen workers still adorned the outside wall. near the door. Naturally, that amount of pain and death in one place would produce a bumper crop of ghost stories, whether anything was actually going on or not. René put down her camera as Gary went on. Well, see, there were lots of workers that got maimed and stuff, right? Because of the machinery. And this one guy, he was walking by one of the big ones and got pulled in and ripped the pieces before anyone could help him. When they finally

got the thing stopped. The only thing they pulled out was his torso. His arms and legs had been crushed and torn to bits, and his head was squished like a pumpkin. He gave a morbid grin. They probably had to hose blood and brains out of the gears for weeks. Ew. Renée thumped his leg and made a face. Dude, that's gross. Oh, it gets better. Gary insisted, grinning, even wider to spite her. They buried the guy, just his torso, because they couldn't find enough of his limbs or his head to put in the coffin. They say he still haunts the factory.

What, with the other 30 or so dead workers? I broke in. Doesn't it get a little crowded? He probably doesn't take up much space. See, it's only his torso that people see. Just a torso? So? René's tone carried a distinct scoff. How does that even work? Does he float around or just flop across the floor or what?

Neither. He just sort of turns up, propped in the corners of rooms. Gary took a swig of his beer. People see him for a second in flashlight beams or camera flashes. Well, that doesn't sound very scary. Gross, sure, but I don't... It's scary. scary enough if you happen to take a picture of him by accident. Gary shot back. See, he's angry about the way he died,

and even angrier that the factory didn't bother to try and find the rest of him before he was buried. He wants his limbs back, so they say. He lowered his voice to a theatrical Vincent Price whisper. They say he steals limbs from the living. If you take his picture, he'll come find you and rip off bits of him. of you to make himself complete again. That sounds like a load of crap. Renee stood and went to get a beer of her own.

Good for scaring the kitties, though. We could go and find out, you know. It's not that far from here. We could drive over in like half an hour and see for ourselves. What? Are you nuts? No, seriously. Gary bounded up and leaned over the back of the sofa. Let's do it. Bring your camera and I'll drive and we'll go check it out tonight.

So that was how the three of us wound up in a car, questionably sober and heading for a crumbling old warehouse on the waterfront. Renee and I weren't totally on board, but Gary was jazzed enough for all three of us. The place was dark when we pulled up and completely silent except for the distant sound of waves on pylons. All right, Gary crowed. Let's go hunt us a ghost. He vaulted out of the car. René shot me a, can you believe this idiot look? And we followed him.

We pulled ourselves up on an open loading dock and went inside. As expected, it was pitch black. Gary and I clicked on the flashlights we'd brought with us, and Renee clicked on her camera. All right, genius. She said in tones of barely restrained sarcasm. Now what? You're the photographer. You tell me.

Gary shot back. How about a group shot to test the camera? I suggested just to keep them from bickering. This seemed to do the trick. Renee set the camera on a barrel by the door, set the timer. We posed against the wall of corrugated metal, Charlie's Angel's style, like a bunch of dorks. The flash blinded us all for a second.

While we stood there, blinking the spots out of our eyes, something clanked in the darkness. Dude, already? Gary flashed his light into the open doorway behind us. That was quick. I tried to take it. Tell him not to get excited that it might have just been a chain moving in the wind or a piece of rusted out equipment shifting. But Gary wasn't listening. He ran off into the darkness before either of us could stop him.

Oh, hell. René muttered. We ran after him, but the factory floor was a maze of chain-linked partitions and hulking hunks of metal that were once state-of-the-art machinery. Gary didn't respond to our calls of his name. We looked for the flickering beam of his flashlight, but no luck there either. Gary, where the hell are you? Rene hissed. Her nail suddenly dug into my arm.

Did you hear that? I paused, listening. For a few seconds, there was nothing. Then there was a low, soft. scraping sound somewhere nearby. Something was sliding across the cement floor, scratching and grating softly as it went. My blood froze in my veins. The image of the dead man's mangled torso flashed into my head, a bloody headless thing dragging itself across the floor by the stumps of bone protruding from its severed limbs.

The sound came nearer, inch by inch. With every scrape, my heart gave a painful jerk against my ribs, and Renee's nail sank deeper into the sleeve of my jacket. It was only feet away now. Renée shrieked, and I brought my flashlight up, futilely thinking it might be used as a weapon. Holy balls that's bright. Gary threw up his hands to block the glare.

René punched him. You asshole! What the hell were you doing running off like that? I found something. Come on! Without waiting for an answer, he took off again. What could we do but follow him? Fortunately, this time he stayed in range of my flashlight, and we found ourselves standing in front of a particularly large and decrepit looking piece of machinery that sported a giant wheel on one side.

This is it. Gary told us with a triumphant spread of his arms, as if this were an art exhibition and he'd just unveiled his masterpiece. This is what? René and I said almost in unison. Oh, come on, look. He pointed to some of the same. odd brown stains on the metal grating beneath his feet. Those have to be bloodstains. I'll bet this is the machine that... We froze, staring. The wheel had just moved.

It was the barest inch of a turn, but the damn thing had moved. Another couple of inches. Something clunked ominously, and with a tortured screech of old metal, the wheel began to turn. Gary? Rene said in a terrified whisper. Gary, get away from there. No way. This is what we came to see.

Come on, take a picture. Let's see if we can catch the ghost. Gary's grin was practically maniacal as he stood beside the slowly awakening machine. It was at the exact moment when I decided I'd had just about enough and was stepping forward to put an end to things by dragging his fool ass out of there if I had to, that everything went straight to hell. Gary's foot slipped on the grating. Before René or I could reach him, both his legs had been pulled under the wheel. The scream that echoed off those walls was one I don't think I'll ever be able to get out of my head.

It went on and on, hoarse and ugly, underlaid by a wet crunching sound as the wheel gained momentum, and the rusted metal turned dark and wet. With a sickening lurch, we managed to pull Gary out of the gears, but it was too late. His legs were mangled stumps pumping crimson puddles onto the floor, and his skin was already turning waxy, his pupils fixed and unresponsive. Oh, shit, I heard myself say. Oh, shit! We got to get out of here.

Renée's voice shook. We've got to get help. A clank from the machine was all it took to send us running. Through the labyrinth of the factory floor, back toward the entrance, we practically flew, barely seeing our way by the beam of the flashlight. The open bay was a patch of lighter darkness, and we aimed for it at full speed. I practically dove off the loading dock, landing hard on the asphalt, and turned back to help Renee down. I started digging for my cell phone to call. Well, I don't know.

An ambulance would have been pretty pointless, and we were trespassing, so the cops were out of the question. Suddenly, Renee turned back. I left my camera. Renee, wait! She ran back to the loading dock and tried to haul herself up on it. I heard a snap and a screech of metal,

and could only watch in horror as the bay door. came crashing down. Renee's scream split the night air like a siren, and she staggered back. Both arms neatly severed just above the elbow. Red gore painted streaks down the lip of the loading dock. Right about then is when everything went black. I woke up in the hospital two days later.

The cops badgered me about our reasons for being there. took my statement about the ghost story, the machine that moved on its own, and what had happened to Gary and René. They told me Gary never made it out of the factory. He'd lost too much blood, and he'd breathed his last right there on the metal grating where we'd left him. Renée was still in a coma. Doctors weren't optimistic about her chances due to the trauma. inflicted by the falling bay door, but in the end, she pulled through. After the investigation wrapped up and I finally got out of intensive care, they gave me René's camera.

Somehow it had remained intact and undisturbed on that barrel just inside the door. I borrowed a laptop and flicked through the photos on the memory card. I don't know what I was looking for. I think I just wanted to see their faces again, wanted to try to overwrite the awful images etched on the inside of my skull. There were only a dozen or so, but it helped. Pictures of the three of us drinking beer, making goofy faces, grinning like idiots. I felt a lump rising in my throat. Gary had been kind of a dumbass sometimes,

but we'd been friends since grade school, and I was going to miss him terribly. I looked at the picture of Renee balancing a bottle on one finger and tried to wrap my brain around the idea that she'd never be able to drink on her own again without help or a prosthetic. The very last picture was the one we'd taken upon entering the factory. I almost didn't want to look at it, didn't want to see those last moments we'd spent together before. Before.

It took a half an hour of hovering over the next button before I finally summoned up the strength to click. There we were, in what was probably the worst Charlie's Angels trio pose ever. I laughed in spite of myself and felt my eyes prickle with tears. The upward angle of the flash had reflected strangely on the corrugated metal, making our shadows loom above us like harbingers of doom. Then I saw it. In the very edge of the photo was a skinny black rectangle that marked the doorway Gary had run through. I could only see half of it, but that was enough.

In the very bottom of the doorway was a pale, mangled-looking lump. I somehow knew what it was before I fully processed exactly what I was looking at. It was a limbless human torso. We'd been feet away from the thing when the flash went off. Gary was closest, René was in the middle, and then me. As I stared at the photo, trying to find some other explanation, trying to think of anything that didn't involve vengeful, limb-ripping ghosts, I noticed something else.

Our shadows weren't just distorted. They were incomplete. Gary had lost his life. legs. Gary's shadow had no legs. Renee had lost her arms. Renee's shadow had no arms. And now I'm terrified to leave this hospital, terrified to go anywhere outside of my room,

terrified of what's waiting for me out there. Because in the photo, my shadow had no heart. Head. Your 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 nosleeppodcast.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 us again for the next episode of the No Sleep Podcast.