The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S6E18

Episode Date: January 31, 2016

It's episode 18 of Season 6. On this week's show we have six tales about visceral visions, cantankerous curses, and wicked wilderness.The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales."Black Magic" written by Rona Vaselaar and read by Corinne Sanders & Erika Sanderson & Kyle Akers. (Story starts at 00:04:05)"Nurse's Training" written by Rona Vaselaar and read by Rima Chaddha Mycynek & Nikolle Doolin. (Story starts at 00:15:20)"My Grandmother’s Doll" written by Henry Galley and read by David Ault & James Cleveland. (Story starts at 00:27:05)"Bacon Came Back" written by M.J. Pack and read by David Cummings & Peter Lewis. (Story starts at 00:51:00)"To The New Caretaker of Checkerspot Island" written by E. Blackburn and read by Kyle Akers & Corinne Sanders. (Story starts at 01:08:10)"Search and Rescue – Pt. 1" written by R. Brauer and read by Mike DelGaudio & Nikolle Doolin & Alexis Bristowe & Tisha Boone. (Story starts at 01:32:15)Click here to enter the "Colors of Death" paperback giveaway! Click here to learn more about the book, "Colors of Death" Click here to learn more about artist Stephanie Davidson Click here to learn more about Rona Vaselaar Click here to learn more about Henry Galley Click here to learn more about M.J. Pack Click here to learn more about R. Brauer Click here to learn more about Corinne Sanders Click here to learn more about Erika Sanderson Click here to learn more about Rima Chaddha Mycynek Click here to learn more about Nikolle Doolin Click here to learn more about David Ault Click here to learn more about James Cleveland Click here to learn more about Peter Lewis Click here to learn more about Mike DelGaudio Click here to learn more about Alexis Bristowe Podcast produced by: David CummingsMusic & Sound Design by: Brandon Boone & David Cummings."My Grandmother's Doll" illustration courtesy of Stephanie DavidsonAudio program ©2016 - Creative Reason Media - All Rights Reserved - No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a horror fiction podcast. By listening to our stories, you are choosing to be frightened and disturbed for your entertainment. You do so at your own risk. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast. It's the No Sleep Podcast. I'm David Cummings. Thanks for joining us. On this week's show, we have six tales about Visiting.

Visceral visions, cantankerous curses, and wicked wilderness. A big thanks to all of you who entered our Hide and Seek audiobook giveaway. The contest is now closed and the winners will be contacted shortly. But we have a new contest for you, and it features the first novel from one of our most prolific and favorite authors, Rona Vassilar. In fact, we're kicking off this episode featuring two of Rory. Rona's Stories. I mentioned Rona's novel, Colors of Death, earlier this season, and now we're giving you a chance to win one of ten paperback copies of her book. You can check the links

in the show notes to find out how to enter, and to learn more about Rona and her book, or just head over to contests.com and follow the instructions on the page. And if you'd prefer to give yourself a 100% chance of getting a copy of her novel while supporting Rona's work, please consider purchasing a copy of your own. It's well worth it. I'd like to welcome a new contributor to the podcast. This week's illustration comes to us from artist Stephanie Davidson. Stephanie was born in Hong Kong, but was raised in Tokyo and then in Honolulu. Now she works as an illustrator in New York City and lives alone with a large cat who likes to stare into this one dark corner of the apartment she just moved into. Check the show notes to learn more about

Stephanie and to see samples of some of her brilliantly creepy artwork. We thank you and welcome you to the show, Stephanie. And finally, we're doing something a little different this week which will carry over this and the following two episodes. The final tale will be from the Search and Rescue series. These tales, told by an experienced search and rescue officer from the U.S. Forest Service, describe a number of strange events and occurrences he has experienced in his career. So you can look forward to hearing all of these tales and anecdotes told over three episodes, starting with this one.

So there's no need to search any longer. We'll rescue you in your hunt for scary stories and start the show. In our first tale, we meet a woman who recounts a family tradition about parlor games. In this, our first of two tales from author Rona Vassilar. We learned that these games played inside with wordplay and group interaction. We're fondly recalled as the family grew. but there was one game the woman was forbidden from playing and the reason for that became very clear in her adult life.

Performing this tale are Corinne Sanders, Erica Sanderson, and Kyle Akers. So enjoy your fun in games, but take care if someone suggests playing a game called Black Magic. I don't think many people play parlor games anymore. It's been a long-standing tradition in my mother's family, but no one else seems to know about the games. Still, I rather enjoy them. They're fun. After my father died when I was still a young child, I found myself spending a lot of time with my mother's side of the family.

She still held down a full-time job, and it was easier to let my grandparents and occasionally aunts and uncles babysit me than pay for a nanny or daycare. Even as a kid, I could sense that my mother wasn't happy with this arrangement. She didn't seem to get along with most of her family. Maybe that's why I was so tense the first few times she left me at my grandparents' house. As a way of easing my nerves, they introduced me to the parlor games, and I was hooked. Parlor games are games that are played indoors, often involving some type of riddles or wordplay. I love their cryptic nature, and it didn't take long from me. me to figure out the classics. My favorite was the queen. My grandmother would sit in her armchair

as though it was a throne, and my cousins and I would take turns kneeling before her. She would say to us, each in turn, I am the queen, the most beautiful queen in all the land. You must answer honestly. Who do you love? I was the first of us grandchildren to figure, out that the answer was honestly. My grandparents were a wealth of such games. We played the queen, I'm going on a sailboat, and Rin Tin Tin. We'd play for hours on end, lost in their magic secrecy. My mother would smile a little when I told her about the games.

She herself had played them as a child, as had my aunts and uncles. But there was one game that I wasn't allowed to play. a game whose name wasn't to be mentioned in my mother's presence. Black magic. I learned about it by eavesdropping. Even as a child, I was good at that, and often heard my aunts and uncles discussing it. Whenever it was brought up, they reminisced about how fun it was,

how much they had once enjoyed playing it. Once, but not anymore. I wondered why, but I learned quickly not to ask. I only brought it up to my mother once, and that was enough to see the fire flare up in her eyes as she hissed. Never, ever, speak that name to me again. So wisely, I didn't. No, I left the subject very much alone, until just a few weeks ago. It started because my grandfather passed away.

Grandma had already died a few years before, and his death was not on. unexpected, so his passing left us not only with sadness, but also a touch of relief. Relief that his pain was over, and that their legacy had ended, surrounded by the love of their children and grandchildren, just a few years apart. The aunts and uncles had gone out to discuss something about the burial, dragging my mother with them, who put up a very good pretense of not loathing all of them, much to my amazement, and all of us grandchildren had gathered in the living room to sit and rebrand. remember. It was Andrew who brought up the parlor games.

Do you guys remember when we used to play those? He laughed as some of my cousins groaned. How could we forget? Not when Katie was so good at him. It almost wasn't fun with her winning all the time. Darius said, and I shot him a glare. Hey, I couldn't help that he was a sore loser. Well, there's one game that she never won. on, though. Andrew gave me a sly sort of look. What are you guys talking about? I was annoyed to be out of the loop. The whisper came from somewhere across the room. I'm still not sure who said it. Black magic. My eyes widened and a rush of emotions hit me like a tidal wave. The nostalgia of the

games, the curiosity over the one that set my mother into a fury. The sudden, burning need to know what it was. Oh, yes. We were going to play black magic. We arranged ourselves in a circle on the living room floor, with Andrew acting as the caller, which is what we called the person in charge of directing the game. He instructed us to hold hands,

and my cousins all grasped each other eagerly, watching me for my reaction. After all, I was the only one who'd never played. Okay, since it's Katie's first time, She gets to choose. Choose what? He smiled and shook his head. Choose somebody.

Somebody you don't like. I was bewildered as I sat there, trying to think of someone we all knew. Uh, Ann Coulter? Andrew shook his head impatiently as some of my more conservative cousins glared at me. No, no, no, not a celebrity. someone you know personally. I racked my brains again until I finally came up with a work colleague

that I didn't particularly enjoy interacting with, mostly because he was a sexist dirt bag. Kyle Gentry, Andrew nodded. Okay, repeat after me. It's in the moon, it's in the stars, it's black magic. My cousins and I all chanted together.

It's in the moon, it's in the stars, it's black magic. The overhead light flickered a little, but I was the only one to notice because everyone else had closed their eyes. My gaze drifted to the ceiling and I felt Amalia, who was holding my right hand, squeeze it reassuringly. It's in the breeze, it's in the air, magic. And we repeated, it's in the breeze, it's in the air, it's in the air, it's supposed. Black magic. The flickering was getting worse. I heard the TV turning on and off by itself.

It seemed as though power was surging and ebbing through all the electronics in the house. I tried to pull my hands away, but my cousins grasped me tighter. Andrew began one last time. It's in the flesh. It's in the blood. It's black magic. I didn't want to join in. I swear, but my voice didn't seem to agree with me. It's in the flesh. It's in the blood. It's black magic.

The power surged hard and suddenly everything burnt out. The light bulbs and the lamps exploded in a hail of sparks. I could hear the fizzing and popping of cooling circuits and wires. The house was darkest sin and deathly quiet. Just then, the front door opened and my aunts and uncles returned with my mother in My aunt Lucinda looked around disapprovingly, illuminated by the moon through the open door. Now now, were you kids playing black magic? I scrambled up off the floor and towards my mom, afraid she would scream at me.

Indeed, her siblings were watching her with apprehension. Her face had drained of color and she was looking at me in abject horror. Mom, are you okay? She looked at me with a terribly, deep sorrow in her eyes before shaking her head and walking away. I got a call the next day about Kyle Gentry. He'd been found dead in his home, apparent heart attack. Pretty surprising for someone as young and fit as he was.

The strangest thing about it, though, was that all the lights in his house had burned out, and the electrical units were completely shot. I have been racked with guilt ever since. I mean, sure, I didn't like him, but I didn't want him to die. I just thought it was part of the game. That's the most disturbing part now that I think about it, that it is just a game, to my family anyway. All of them except for my mother.

And now, sitting here and typing this in the dark, on my third bottle of beer as I try to wash the bitter taste of the memory out of my mouth. I think I know why. Just like I think I know what happened to my father. Black magic. Working in a hospital is one way to earn some funds for your schooling. As explained by author Rona Vassilar, years ago, one woman going to school to be a nurse

recalls an encounter while working in the hospital's morgue one night. Needless to say, it was a night she will never forget. Performing this tale are Rima Chathamysinic and Nicole Doolin. So make sure you know what you're getting into if you ever need a job to pay for your nurses' training. I really plan to tell anyone this story. It's been well over 50 years, and at the time I thought it wasn't worth it. But as my time on Earth comes to a close,

somehow I can't bear to leave this story to die in the darkness. There is some kind of truth in it, one that I'm too stupid to understand. When I was in my early 20s, I went through nurses' training. It wasn't easy and it wasn't cheap, let me tell you. So I ended up working odd jobs at the hospital, trying to make ends meet. Most of them weren't bad. Mostly, they involved a lot of cleaning and receptionist work. But then, of course,

there was the morgue. I didn't like working down in the morgue. Frankly, I don't know many people who did. But the pay was good for relatively little work. All I had to do was clean and watch over everything if there were no doctors present, which usually only happened late at night. Occasionally, I'd have to help move a body, too,

but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. I'd spend my nights down there, often as many as three or four times a week. I'd clean up and then sit down to study, making sure everything remains ship-shaped, as the nuns used to say. It wasn't a hard job, but I didn't like it. See, the morgue was down in the basement, down long hallways with dim lighting.

You might think that working in a morgue would remind you of death, and, well, you'd be right. But that wasn't all. The whole place felt like death, aside from the dead bodies it regularly housed. It just never felt right to me. I thought it was paranoid. But one night proved to me that it was more than that. I still remember that it was a Thursday.

I don't know why that sticks out so much in my mind, but it does. It was Thursday and I was alone down in the morgue. The night had been relatively uneventful. with only one body brought in. I remember that the doctor who brought the corpse down seemed a little on edge. When I asked why, he said, When this guy came in, he was perfectly fine, but he wouldn't stop shouting about how he was going to die.

We thought he was a hypochondriac, or maybe he was having some kind of mental breakdown. As we went to sedate him, suddenly everything in his body just... It shut down. It was as though everything inside of him stopped. He died in minutes. We simply couldn't resuscitate him.

No one has any idea what killed him. My heart twinged as I helped him put the corpse onto the table. The hospital was stretched a little thin that day, so nobody was going to be able to attend to the poor guy until the next morning. Which also meant that I would be with a stiff the whole night. Well, that didn't bother me much. Sure, it was a little creepy, but nothing I hadn't dealt with before. So, once the doctor left, I pulled out my books and started pouring over them, hoping to dispel some of the tension that had fallen over the morgue. I found myself wishing that I still had something, anything at all, to clean. But the whole damn place was spotless.

I tried to lose myself in the complicated medical terminology in my textbooks, but for whatever reason, that night I was finding it difficult. Maybe it was a woman's intuition, or maybe it was more, animalistic intuition. Either way, I could sense that something strange was going to happen in that morgue. It's cliche, but it happened at midnight. It started with a power outage. The only warning I had was a momentary flickering of the lights before everything shut down. The silence that followed, only broken by the crackling of cooling bulbs.

Shit, I thought. What now? I'd been sitting at the work desk where the attending physicians filled out their paperwork after autopsies, so I let my hands drift over the surface, and, down through the drawers, trying to find a flashlight. I tried not to think about the corpse waiting there in the dark. Jesus, Marybeth, it's just a corpse. It can't hurt you. Suck it up. I was searching the third drawer on the right when the power came back on, and I spotted something strange out of the corner of my eye.

My breath hitched in my throat, because somewhere in the back of my mind I had seen enough to know what it was. But the rest of me was still clueless. Fighting this internal battle, I turned slowly toward the table. The corpse was sitting up. My first thought, of course, was that it wasn't a corpse at all. The doctor did say that he'd sort of just dropped dead. They must have made some sort of mistake.

but something kept me from rushing over to find out if the guy was okay. He wasn't breathing. His body could have been a statue for how still it was. I tried to tell myself that he was most certainly breathing. I just couldn't see it from here. But I wasn't convinced. I tried to force myself to walk over to him, but I couldn't. Suddenly, his head was.

had snapped towards me. I didn't see it happen. I blinked and the position of his head had changed. To make matters worse, it should have been impossible because I was diagonally behind him. Heads do not turn that far back, not unless they're broken or severely damaged. But here he was. His eyes trained on me. And that is when I noticed the eyes.

mostly that they were gone there were just two empty meaty sockets staring back at me and yes they were staring I was positive that the corpse had eyes when it was brought in here it didn't matter because they were gone now I blinked this time it was sitting up and its legs dangling off the side of the table They swung there like the legs of a rag doll, and it was in this terrible motion that I found my voice.

Screamed, and I ran for the door. Do you remember those hallways I told you about? The long ones I had to walk through to get to the morgue? They were lined with bodies. They were still, unbreathing, noticeably dead, and absolutely none of them had eyes. but they all stared at me that almost froze me right there because it felt like being trapped between two deaths

I was absurdly terrified that if I had stepped out into the hallway they'd swarm on me like demonic birds and take out my eyes so I'd look just like them all the while somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the other corpse was fast approaching I made a mistake just then. I turned around. It was standing less than a foot behind me.

Those sockets still bore into me as its mouth hung unhinged. A deep vibration emanated from the body and slowly a tiny trickle of blood dripped out the side of its mouth. My body made my decision for me. me. I ran. I ran and I ran and I ran until I burst out of that hospital. The nurses on call tried to stop me, but I wouldn't be stopped. I ran the few blocks that separated the hospital from our dormitories. I ran inside and collapsed on the floor, frightening the holy hell out of Sister Ruth, who happened to be monitoring the door that night. Sister Ruth was strict, but she was kind.

She knew I was supposed to be in the morgue until about four that morning, so she was ready to give me hell until she saw my face. I don't know what exactly she read my expression, but she didn't chastise me. She didn't ask me what happened either. She simply placed a call to the hospital to notify them that they needed to send someone down to replace me. By the time,

she was off the phone, I was sobbing, the terror-finding vent in my tears. She placed her arms around me and softly whispered. Don't have to go back there. I didn't. In my years as a nurse, never once did I go back down into that morgue, or any morgue for that matter. I am no stranger to death. I'm no stranger to pain. These things don't scare me. No. It's what happens in those first few hours after death that I don't want to know about. When a man who was raised by his loving grandmother is left her entire estate upon her passing, he has to decide what to do with her property. As we learn from author Henry Galley, while cleaning out her house,

he discovers his grandmother's extensive collection of dolls, and one in particular which forms an unsettling connection with him. Performing this tale are David Alt and James Cleveland. So treasure your family's heirlooms, but take this man's advice and stay away from, my grandmother's doll. My grandmother died a few weeks back at the ripe old age of 85, passing away peacefully in her sleep. By all accounts, she lived a damn good life. and I tried my very best to make it so. Lord knows she did the same for me. You see, when a treasured loved one dies, especially one that you grew up with, little solar system of your life is thrown completely out of orbit. Not that mine was ever all that stable in the first place. My parents died in the car accident when I was two years old, and I was a little too young at the time to fully absorb the emotional impact of being orphaned. When the

The prospect of being put into the foster system was brought up by the family lawyer. Grandma took me in without a second thought. Her home was our home. It's where I built my childhood. Honestly, you'd never meet a more charitable woman than my grandma. From the second I came into her life, all the way up to her death, and even beyond, she's provided for me without fail. Another interesting thing about Grandma is the fact she was mute.

I'm not talking about selective mutism here, I'm talking full-blown, constant silence. I've known that woman for my entire 32 years of life, and while I got used to it within a few months, to some it seems crazy that I never heard a word from her. Of course, we had our own ways of communicating back then. I picked up sign language pretty quickly as kids tend to, and she always used to write on this little chalkboard for me. I thought it was awfully cute at the time. I got a call from her lawyer a few days after she passed, telling me she'd left her entire estate to me in her will.

It doesn't matter how well you know a person. That kind of thing always hits you deep. Everything that wasn't covered by her donor card now belonged to me. A week or two passed, some papers were signed and money changed hands. The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly as ever. my grandma's possessions became my possessions, and some eager patients became happy recipients of grandma's remarkably healthy liver, kidneys, and lungs. Like I said, she was the giving type. The home was an old Georgian place, two stories, three bedrooms, and a well-maintained garden.

I felt like a kid who just got a pony for Christmas. The problem was, I'm not a rich enough guy to pay the rent on an apartment and the house. I'm not such a heartless bastard that I'd immediately sell my child at home either, especially on this bipolar property market. I was speaking to a good friend of mine about it over a few drinks, and it was his idea to convert it into a rental property. I mould it over when I was sober, of course, but my office job wasn't going anywhere, so I decided that being a landlord might be a welcome change of pace. That was when things started to to go downhill. I showed up at the house with all my supplies on Monday, my car full of paint, tools, and industrial strength bin bags. It took me a few minutes to gather the strength to go in

at first. This house had a lot of history for me. Good times, bad times, like I said, this was where I grew up, and Grandma's death has made all the nostalgia taste bitter to me. The faster I did it, I kept telling myself the less it would hurt. like ripping off a band-aid. The place had barely changed since I moved out at 21. It felt like a picture frozen in time waiting for my return. I guess I granted its wish in that sense. It just didn't expect me to start tearing down the wallpaper.

I was methodical, going from room to room, watching scenes from my childhood replay in the theatre of the mind, before I started repainting and remodeling everything in sight. God, I forgot how ancient the place looked. Grandma's sense of style never really left the 70s. Once the downstairs was bare and I dragged all of the furniture onto the front lawn, my drinking buddies were suspiciously absent when I needed help with the heavy lifting. I had a break for lunch and did some exploring.

The rooms upstairs were just like I remembered them. Grandma's room and the bed she'd never again sleep in was late. out neatly as ever. My room was just the same, covered in peeling Nirvana posters and bearing all the hallmarks of your garden variety edgy 90s teenager. When I left home, I told her to turn it into a games room or a quiet room where she could read her books, just something she could enjoy. I guess she never got around to it, or she expected me to come back someday. Tears were welling up in my eyes when I saw that her old chalkboard was laying on my bed with, well, come home, written on it. The one room I hadn't yet checked was the attic. Back when I was a kid,

I was never allowed up there. Grandma said, or rather, wrote, that it was too dangerous, so I stayed downstairs whenever she occasionally made her pilgrimage up the hallway stairs. But Grandma was dead, and I'm an adult. I figured that if there's a little, I figured that if the attic was big enough, I could convert it into a loft room and take on another lodger. It'd be more income if I was right, so it felt almost stupid to miss out. Flashlight in hand, I made my way up the stairs into the attic. The bulbs up there were long since fucked, so my only source of light was the thin shard emitted by the flashlight. I'd never been a superstitious man, but something about the attic made me feel uneasy. Naturally, at first I didn't see anything but old bag,

boxes and suitcases. I made a mental note to check those later while I forged deeper into the surprisingly spacious attic. My eyes were on the money and the chances of being able to install a room up here looked hopeful. Then a shape got caught in the beam of my flashlight and I felt my heart skip a beat. It was shaped like a leg, a baby's leg, like it had been ripped from the socket. I rushed over to take a closer look and felt the greatest relief of my life when I realized it was plastic. Shortly after that, a second wave of creep set in, because what was a plastic baby leg doing in my grandma's attic? I picked it up and swept the area with my flashlight until I caught something familiar in the corner. That didn't make it any less weird, though.

There were dolls. hundreds of fucking dolls. Big, small, old, new, expensive, cheap. From porcelain dolls to Barbie dolls, to American girl dolls, to cabbage patch dolls, all various sizes, shapes, materials and colours. I almost dropped the flashlight when I saw all their dead eyes glaring at me, thinking my grandma was the next rose west until I realized that they were all fake. They were arranged in a big pile like some kind of shrine.

When my heartbeat had normalized again, I took a few steps closer, letting my flashlight cut through the gloom. So my grandma had been collecting these all these years, and she never wanted me to see them. Not a bad call, actually. They made me feel uncomfortable then. God knows what I'd have thought of them 20 years earlier. While I'm sure they had a lot of sentimental value to my grandma, they sure as hell didn't have any to me. I figured that no lodgers would want to stay in a home that seemed like some demented serial killers person-sized dollhouse. They had to go. All of them.

I fetched some of the bin bags from my car and started packing up some of the smaller ones, just chipping away at Mount creepy bit by bit. The way grandma had stacked them didn't even leave them all visible, as dolls on top of dolls, each one just as horrible as the last. All except one. I found her lurking underneath the others, her face buried in the back of a tattie rag doll. It was like she didn't want to be seen, or that my grandma didn't want me to find her. She was bigger than the rest, about the size of a four-year-old child, but with slightly off proportions.

Her little pinched up face was moulded from rubber and plastic and her long black hair looked like fibroptic tubing. It's one of those things that's difficult to put into words, but something about her just repulsed me. Maybe it was those vacant blue eyes or the little silk dress that reminded me of those post-mortem photographs they took of children in the Victorian era. It all just felt eerie and wrong. reaching out to touch her the flashlight clenched between my teeth felt like I was reaching to grab a live tarantula

she was a lot heavier than I expected her to be the torch glare revealed all the tiny scratches and imperfections in the plastic making her look even uglier another thing I noticed when the light was shining directly on her face was that while her mouth was closed the rubber on her tiny, life-like lips wasn't sealed together. There was a black slit running between them. I have never felt as disgusted in my entire life as I did when those little lips twitched, like something was moving behind her dead face. My initial thoughts were animatronics like those dolls designed to suckle on little bottles when you put them in their mouths, but this doll looked.

way too old for that kind of technology. So, being curious like a certain dead cat, I put my thumb on the doll's chin and gently slid open the mouth. In the darkness, something was stirring. The doll had a tongue, a human tongue, not just a severed piece of flesh rotting away in there, but a moving, wriggling, salivating tongue. It came bulging out past the lips, writhing lazily, before licking at my thumb. It was hot, damp, and stank of cigarettes. I screamed, dropping the flashlight onto the ground and hurled the doll at the wall. I bolted through the darkness on memory alone,

knocking over boxes and leaping over suitcases before tumbling down the stairs in panic. I must have cleared the upstairs faster than any human being alive and sprang through the front door of the house, never looking back. The front door was open and the lawn was still covered in furniture, but I didn't care. The home was out of the way anyway if people made the effort to come down here. They could take what they like. Fuck that doll. Fuck that house. I jammed the keys into the ignition and took off like a gunshot, leaving the neighbourhood at three times the legal speed limit.

It must sound crazy now, I know, but logic was the third. this thing from my mind. I tore my way home at 80 miles an hour and didn't feel safe until I was in my flat. The door slammed and locked behind me. I was hyperventilating for a little while. I threw up once, almost fainted twice. At the time I tried to justify it, assuming that maybe it was the fumes from all that cheap paint making me see things, making me a little kooky. I'd been under so much stress lately. I'd gotten so little sleep. It's no wonder I'm imagining such ridiculous things. It's Things. The fear is exhausting.

It takes a physical toll on you. Once the initial shockwaves had passed, I couldn't think about anything but sleep. God, I was so tired I could barely stand. Moments later I collapsed into bed, fully clothed. I was asleep before I even realized. Sleep wasn't much of a reprieve. I kept dreaming about that terrible doll crawling over my paralyzed body like a spider. dragging its warm, stinking tongue across my face.

No matter how hard I tried, there was no pushing it from my mind as little blue eyes were branded into my thoughts. When I woke up the next morning, I felt like I'd taken a 12-gauge blast of the face. My head throbbed, my skin burned. I just felt so itchy all over like my bed had been swarming with fire ants. Over time, the itches became more localized.

When I realized that I could feel it definitively on my forearm, I peeled back my sleeve to take a look. There was a patch of skin that had gone hard and smooth, and I mean rigid, rock solid. It had an almost reflective quality to it where all the hair had somehow fallen out. The skin around it itched like hell, but when I went to touch the patch itself, I didn't feel anything. I found more of these patches on my body when I inspected myself in the bathroom mirror. Those hard, reflective, feelingless patches. There was one on my inner thigh, one on my belly, two on my chest, and another on my left bicep.

When I tried to peel one of the patches away, it just started bleeding. The patches weren't growing on my skin. The patches were my skin. The next day I had an appointment with my life. local GP about the issue. I stripped off in his office, letting him see the patches. A few more had grown on my legs since last time. And worst of all, he seemed equally baffled. I must admit, these are really quite extraordinary circumstances. He tried and failed to cross-reference my symptoms against known diseases on the medical database. I can't say I've personally seen anything like this before.

I tried my best to stop myself from itching at the patches. Please, doctor, there's got to be something you can do for me, something you can give me maybe, like pills or an ointment. He'd fallen silent, reading more small type from the screen of his computer. Well, I can book you an appointment to a dermatologist. Great, when's the soon as he can see me? Not until next week, I'm afraid. Next week? But, Doctor, I can't wait until next to next.

week. I'm afraid he doesn't have any appointments prior to Wednesday of next week. If you feel, as though it escalates severely before then, contact A&D through their standard emergency number and the hospital will take care of you as best they can. I am sorry, this is all I can offer. Things got worse after that. I penciled my date with a dermatologist onto the kitchen wall calendar, but my skin condition was worsening. The patches were covering at least a third of my body by Wednesday. They'd grown on my legs, my arms, my ass, my back, my chest, my stomach. They were even starting to grow on my face. I couldn't go into a well-lit room without patches of my skin shining. It all came to ahead on Wednesday night

as I stood before the bathroom mirror. A patch of shiny, hard skin was beginning to grow on my cheek, making it harder to move my face. I picked at the ragged edges of some. I picked at the ragged edges of soft skin, wincing in pain while I did so, until I noticed a piece of loose skin sticking out from my face just on the edge of the patch. I grabbed it between my thumb and forefinger and started pulling, and a long swath of translucent soft skin peeled away from my face, revealing more rigid, reflective skin underneath. A few seconds later, I vomited into the bathroom sink. This was the last straw. It pushed me over the edge, the floodgates of rationality gave way to maddening truth. It was all that fucking

doll. I had to put a stop to it. I had to know what the hell was going on with me. I got into the car with a kitchen knife slid into my belt and started driving towards Grandma's house. It was foggy out, low visibility, real horror movie weather. I was too angry to be afraid, too shocked to be uneasy. Soon there was going to be more of that awful plastic. skin than there was real skin. I'd look like some perverse shop window mannequin. The furniture was still all over the front garden when I arrived. The front door was still wide open.

Nothing had been touched. Frozen. A picture. Waiting just for me. I have to do it fast, I thought. If I do it fast, it'll hurt less like ripping off a band-aid. Christ. Deja Vu.

I stormed through the front door and barged upstairs, knife in one hand and flashlight in the other. My footsteps slowed as I trudged along the landing towards the attic stairs. The fear and trepidation was setting in. It felt palpable like it was squeezing me. Or maybe that was just my skin. The attic, like everything else, was just the same as I left it. The bastard dull was still there.

there too, I could see it very faintly its face to the ground, its body crumpled in the corner where I threw it, where it belonged. I held the flashlight in my teeth again and headed over to the doll, remembering its bizarre weight. I grabbed it by the scruff of its dirty silk dress and yanked it up into my arms. Once again, the harsh light was shining directly into the doll's face. Oh dear God! The doll. It was covered in patches of skin.

My skin, my soft pink skin. Some were sporadic, some were close together, but what was unmistakable was that the doll was somehow growing new skin, growing my skin, while the skin on my body turned to rigid plastic. I dropped the doll and stumbled backwards, the knife clinking to the floor

and flashlight rolling off, casting errant shadows on the wall. My skin was on fire again, my head was spinning, I vomited onto the ground and clung against a wall trying to steady myself in a world that didn't make sense anymore. Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket, resurrecting me from my trance. I pulled it out of my pocket with a trembling hand and pressed the answer button before holding it against my ear. To SAMHSA speaking, something about... What?

Your grandmother on verbal, wasn't she? Yeah. When did she have the Protestant? fitted. This jogged me from the haze. I'm sorry, prosthetic? I don't follow. Her prosthetic tongue. My blood ran cold. What? Her prosthetic tongue. Where such a thing existed, in all honesty.

It appeared to be polymer-based, but it was so perfectly fused to the tissue in her lower jaw that, well, it didn't seem like any old replacement part. Perhaps some kind of bonding agent was used that affixed it to the tool. I dropped the phone while the doctor rambled on. He was wrong, of course, but he'd given me the final piece of this whole insane puzzle. Yes, it all made sense after that. When you touch the doll, it takes things from you. It took my grandmother's tongue a long time ago, and now it's taking my skin.

I can't imagine we were the first. There were some donors out there somewhere that made the doll that heavy. I walked from the attic, silent, almost catatonic, and sat in my car. I didn't move for quite some time and in the sideways glances I made towards the house, I could have sworn I saw that doll at one of the second-story windows staring down at me. But who knows? The mind plays all kinds of tricks. time is short I'm running out of skin

thankfully my fingers have lasted this long but I don't expect them to be here much longer it's only a matter of time before I'm a prisoner of my skin the doll's out there now somewhere just a leaf in the wind if that somewhere is near you I hope to God you don't touch it because the last time I saw it

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