The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S6E23

Episode Date: March 6, 2016

On this week's show we have five tales about medical madness, psychotic sleeping, reaping revenge.The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales."Ten Days, Ten Pills" written by Elias Witherow and read by Peter Lewis. (Story starts at 00:03:35)"Does It Hurt When You Sleep?" written by Kerry H. and read by Jeff Clement & Nikolle Doolin. (Story starts at 00:23:45)"We All Love Feeling Scared" written by Matt Dymerski and read by Jesse Cornett & Jessica McEvoy & Corinne Sanders. (Story starts at 00:49:00)"Shambles" written by Kerry H. and read by David Ault. (Story starts at 01:17:20)"The Reaping of Bobby Ward" written by Keith McDuffee and read by Mike DelGaudio & Dan Zappulla & Elie Hirschman & Nikolle Doolin. (Story starts at 01:34:50)Click here to learn more about Elias Witherow Click here to learn more about Kerry H. Click here to learn more about Matt Dymerski Click here to learn more about Keith McDuffee Click here to learn more about Peter Lewis Click here to learn more about Jeff Clement Click here to learn more about Nikolle Doolin Click here to learn more about Jesse Cornett Click here to learn more about Jessica McEvoy Click here to learn more about Corinne Sanders Click here to learn more about David Ault Click here to learn more about Mike DelGaudio Click here to learn more about Dan Zappulla Click here to learn more about Elie Hirschman Podcast produced by: David CummingsMusic & Sound Design by: Brandon Boone & David Cummings."The Reaping of Bobby Ward" illustration courtesy of CJ RobinsonAudio program ©2016 - Creative Reason Media Inc. - All Rights Reserved - No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc.. 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 five tales about medical.

madness, psychotic sleeping and reaping revenge. I'd like to welcome the many people who are new to our show and who are discovering what we do here at the No Sleep Podcast. We're so glad you like the show. And there are many talented people out there who want to contribute to what we do. Narrators and illustrators especially are contacting us in droves. It's wonderful to experience such enthusiasm and I'm grateful so many of you want to share your talent with us. Unfortunately, at this time, we're not actively looking to add people to our roster. As the end of the season draws near, I am utterly swamped with work, even more so than usual. So if you've contacted me lately inquiring about becoming a narrator or illustrator,

please understand that I do appreciate the offer, but it will likely take me a lot of long time to respond to you if and when we add more people to the show. I'm rather terrible with my email responses at the best of time, so please understand that my inbox is a virtual black hole for anything other than tech support these days. And speaking of welcoming new people to the show, I want to welcome our new illustrator this week. C.J. Robinson provided the creepy artwork for this episode. CJ lives in San Francisco with her cat and works in the game industry.

And if her name sounds familiar, you may recognize it from the story she wrote for us back in episode eight of this season. Rooms Available for Cheap. So welcome back to the show, CJ, as both author and illustrator. And with that and with no time left in our busy schedule to do anything else,

Let's start the show. In our first tale, we meet a man in need of some medical help. As we learn from author Elias Withero, the man's doctor puts him on a 10-day trial for an experimental drug and asks him to document his experience. As you'll hear from the man's journal, the new drug doesn't do much to help him. Performing this tale is Peter Lewis.

So get that spoonful of sugar ready, because it's going to be 10 days, 10 pills. Day you won't try in a new medication. My doctor recommended it. Said it would help with things. It's a new drug, still in the testing phase, so they're putting me on a 10-day trial. Minimal side effects, really no risk, so they say. My doctor said I should document any changes I feel, good or bad, regarding my behavior. So I started this little diary.

I feel kind of silly. I've never been the journal type. I just got home from the docks about 20 minutes ago. I'm about to take one of these little pills. I feel a little nervous, despite his reassurances. I'm probably just paranoid, as usual. Here we go. Day two, I didn't sleep very well.

I had headaches all night. The doctor said that was a possible side effect. Other than that, I haven't noticed any differences. I took some Advil around four, and that seems to be helping. I'm about to make lunch. say I should take these pills on a full stomach. I'm glad I don't have to go into work today. I think after lunch I'm going to take a nap, and my head has finally stopped killing me. This is the second entry of day two. It's funny, maybe I actually like doing this.

Anyway, I'm about to go to bed. Earlier, I ate lunch and took my pill and passed out on the couch, of weird dreams. It's strange because I never have dreams. Anyway, it's almost midnight and I need to get some sleep. I'm going to try and make the most of my Sunday and get an early start. Maybe go down to the lake. Hopefully it doesn't rain on me. Day three.

Weird, weird day today, eh? Everything was. fine until I went to the lake. I took my pill around noon before I went. I don't know if that has anything to do with what happened. I don't see how it could, but regardless, the whole point of this journal is to record anything out of the ordinary while on this trial. So I went to the lake around three. I brought my book and towel, laid out on the shore, sunny, warm, a nice day. There were a few families there, mostly little kids and a few teenagers. Everything was going okay until, well, I heard this horn.

I have to understand this lake is out in the middle of nowhere. It's a local secret. You have to take this awful dirt road through the woods to even get there. But once you're there, it's beautiful. A year ago, some of the locals dumped sand along the shore and have kept it groomed since then. It's like being at the ocean in the middle of a forest. So anyway, it's about six o'clock, and the sun is going down, and this horn. starts blaring from the woods. It's distant and low, rumbling across the water from the far bank.

It reminded me of one of those old Viking horns. Bewildered, I realized I was the only one who seemed to hear it. I looked around, tearing my sunglasses off, and no one even blinked at the sudden noise. And after about three minutes, the horns, But I decided it was time to leave. I started packing up my car. Froze, one hand on the driver's side door.

Because across the lake, three figures were watching me at the water's edge. They were far away too far to make out their features. It looked like three men, but I couldn't be sure. matter how hard I squinted, I couldn't see them clearly. Thoroughly scared, I pulled my door open and hopped in my car. But even as I drove away, I could feel their gaze in my rear view mirror. Dave, of all this, my pill a little before breakfast, but I'm wondering if I should have held off. It seems to make these headaches worse.

I went to work today but couldn't seem to concentrate. I felt like someone was watching me. I feel like there's someone watching me now. For in the morning, I just woke up from a nightmare. I heard that horn again. I don't know if it was outside or in my dream. but it woke me up. I'm sweating like crazy.

I mean, it scared the shit out of me. I keep thinking I see things move past my window. Day five. Today, it was much better. I called my doctor and told him about all the strange stuff. He told me the headaches and dreams were probably just a side effect, nothing to worry about. He seemed skeptical about the other stuff, though. I told him everything, and God bless him, he listened to all of my ramblings. He assured me that it was probably just

stress-related, but to contact him if it got worse. He reminded me that this wasn't an approved drug, but it was the best chance he had of helping me. I'm a very chance. I'm a very chance. I'm a just going to suck it up. He said I just had to finish the 10-day trial and then we could re-evaluate. And I'm halfway there. Day six last night. Dreamed something was sliding around my floor like a shadow under my feet. Every time I tried to move away from it, it would zip back under me. I crawled up, slid up the wall like a dark piece of paper. Right before I woke up, I thought I heard giggling under my bed, got home.

Something didn't seem right in my apartment, the closet door in the bedrooms. I don't remember opening it this morning. I guess I could have forgotten about it. I made sure to close it tight. Something is giggling in my bedroom closet. I don't know why, but every ounce of me is telling me to just ignore it, and it will go away. Keep myself from going into full-blown. Seven, I'm sitting on my couch.

Whether I need to call my doctor, I don't feel good. I took my pill. I don't know why. I have this feeling that if I just make it through the ten days, everything will return to normal. Out of work, closed all the blinds. I just want to sit in the dark and not. Plus sleep.

My head is still cute. Giggling me. Something is really wrong with me. I think there's something standing on my balcony. Distant, barely audible, is giggling all the horrible things that have been happening. The ten needed to, or they would come get me. When I asked who, he hung up. He hung up. He seemed flustered, scared. What is doing this to me?

I'm still sitting on my couch. I don't want to move. I don't care. I just need to finish this trial. Just be done with it. I think there's something in my bedroom. I can't see it because my door is closed. but I can hear it.

It walks around on heavy feet and then giggles. I feel like if I just ignore it, it can't hurt me, right? I'm being terrified, though. Something just opened. bedroom door. I can feel it staring at me, but I refuse to look at it. I'm concentrating on this to keep my eyes away from it.

It's beating so fast I feel like I'm going to throw up. It is dark. But I can see the long. the long black of its form out of the corner of my eye. It's just standing there, like it's waiting for me to acknowledge it. It's going to kill me if I do. I know it well. It just giggled at me.

The child-blood. Light sound ripping through the darkness. What eight-foot thing makes us sound like it. Why won't it move? What does it want from me? Behind me, too. I won't look. I won't.

So I won't look like there's three behind me. Morning. Just need to make it. Until the sun comes out. I called my doctor, told him I finished the 10-day trial, told him about my horrible nighttime visitors, and, you know, fucking did he. Big, loud, gut-busting laughter.

And once he got himself under control a little bit, He told me that the pills, he told me the pills were possible reasons to this revelation and reaction from him. He'd laugh him again. And I asked what the hell he was talking about. The whole. He said it was a little game he had concocted it for me. He said there was no hope for me. He told me that a paranoid, schizophrenic, like myself, who suffered from chronic hallucinations, deserved to be in an asylum.

He told me that there was no, that he just wanted to play off my illness, really wind me up, before recommending me to be institutional. He hung up to his howling, like my hands were shaking. I comprehended. I couldn't wrap my head around why he would do something like this. Getting better, sane, really are an entirely different kind of... ...gays, college campuses are abuzz with endless forms of messaging, emails, and online communication. It can be very helpful. It can be very helpful most of the time.

But as author Carrie H. explains, when a series of strange emails start to spread around a campus, a type of hysteria has created, and soon there may be no turning back. Performing this tale are Jeff Clement and Nicole Doolin. So try to stay calm if you're ever asked the simple question, does it hurt when you sleep? The first email was sent around midnight.

I was cramming for a test and I heard my notification go off. I have a very specific tone for academic things and it surprised me to hear it that late. I checked it out and felt that tingly, lower belly excitement, the kind that only comes from seeing someone fuck up catastrophically. It was very clearly not an email that was meant to be sent from that account. It was only one sentence and it wasn't signed. It had been sent to the entire student body and staff and it was coming from the administrative office. All it said was, I read the email a couple of times before I googled the message. I wondered if

maybe it was a reference to something, a movie or a TV show, but I didn't come up with anything that I thought was related. Mostly just alien abduction accounts or webmd horror stories about detached retinas. I closed the browser, finished studying, and went to bed. I watched the back of my eyelids for a bit. No flashes. I passed out. The next morning, the chaos I'd anticipated was very much a reality.

We're a small rural college and not a lot of... excitement happens here, so any event tends to throw us all overboard. Some of the more dramatic girls were terrified, and I heard a lot of whispered conversations about terrorists. It took a lot of self-restraint to avoid politely informing them how assinine that idea was. Most people just wanted to know who'd done it, and there were a lot of guesses. Obviously, it had to be someone who either had the password to the account or knew enough to hack it, and in both cases it pointed to one of the office interns. There were only a handful of those, and one in particular was known to be very good with computers, so most people leaned toward him. The teachers, having also received the email,

assured us that the school was looking into it and that pranks were taken very seriously when they involves such a huge breach of confidentiality. Later that evening, after a day of rumors and speculation, an official email from the administration was released. It claimed that the breach had been located and patched up by the IT team. There was no mention of the culprit. With the mystery diffused, if not exactly solved, the excitement faded, and by the next day we'd mostly forgotten about it.

until the second email came out. We were in the middle of class, and those of us with our phones on received a notification. I pulled mine out of my pocket, ignoring the teacher's monologue about the importance of paying attention to see what I'd gotten. The email was, again, only one sentence, and sent from the same admin address.

Murmurs rippled through the class, and the teacher, sensing that something had happened, checked his email. He read the message, shut his laptop, and called the front office. He spoke quietly and listened for a moment before hanging up. This is all very strange and interesting, but let's get back to the subject here. No one was focused, but we made it through the class with no further interruption. In my room that night, I looked at the two messages side by side. is anyone else seeing flashing lights when they try to sleep?

It really hurts to sleep, or any of you noticing it too? I took a sip of my drink and thought about it. I found it strange that someone would go through so much trouble to send emails to the student Bonnie. Surely they could have just hacked into the account, taking the address, and sent the emails with a throwaway account. But for whatever reason, they chose to use the official admin account. For the first breach, they might have been suspended, maybe had a scholarship taken away. It could have been an accident. But for this, an intentional use of the account, this would almost certainly mean they'd be kicked out.

Hell, they might even face jail time. What could possibly be so worth the risk? What could they do on the admin account that they couldn't do any other way? I sat and stared at the messages, thought for a while. What was so important that was worth potential jail time? What would I consider that critical, that necessary, to spread as widely as possible? Suddenly inspired, I googled flashing lights behind the eyes as a symptom. migraine headaches, detached retinas, stroke, eye disease, certain infections.

A thought began to form a distant memory of something I'd read a long time ago. Putting it aside, I moved on to the second email. It hurts to sleep. But that was a bit harder to figure out. Did they mean it physically hurt to sleep? I looked up Restless Leg Syndrome, which was described as incessant tingling or the constant driving need to move the legs. Was that what they meant? Or did they mean that it hurt to sleep because the things they dreamed of were painful?

I wondered if the things described were meant to be taken literally or if it was an illusion, a poem of sorts. It seemed unlikely, given that the first message. seemed consistent with a physical ailment. I was troubled, and I dug a little deeper. Certain infections of the sinuses, of the lining of the brain, could cause pain even while in REM sleep. I sat back and looked at the emails again, not wanting to jump to conclusions.

I tried to keep things in perspective, but my heart was beating a little faster. I decided that the best thing to do was, wait. I studied for a test the next day and went to bed. I slept fine. In the afternoon, the administration called for a mandatory all-school assembly. They addressed the emails and urged whoever was doing it to come forward. If they did so, they would avoid expulsion. But no one did. So the rest of the assembly was spent discussing internet safety, expected student behavior things like that.

All of us studied each other, looking for anyone who stuck out, who was too uncomfortable or appeared even vaguely guilty. After the assembly, a few people claimed unofficial responsibility, but these claims were debunked quickly. So the speculation continued,

and a lot of theories were thrown around. Some were similar to mine, others wildly different. The consensus, however, was that whoever was doing it wanted something. What was it? Help? Advice? An answer?

What? We couldn't respond to them. So what exactly did they hope to gain from the emails? As the emails continued, the memory I'd had on the backburner came forward. And more and more, I felt sure that I knew what the anonymous writer was asking for. I didn't share my views, but I began to prepare. The emails were sent at staggered times, each from the admin account. As time passed, they became less and less coherent.

You start to have trouble, remember attention. Despite being what most people believed and were assured was, a prank, the school became enveloped in a kind of hysteria. The culprit was using proxies and other means to avoid detection. Although the admin email was supposedly protected, they gained access easily. Many students began to suspect that they were attempting to report a cover-up of some sort. Was there something going on that the administration didn't want us to know? What information was this person who people started calling proxy,

as he was mistakenly referred to in an admin response email, trying so hard to pass along to us. And what did he mean by masks? Many students began wearing medical masks, convinced that some kind of superflu was going around behind the scenes. The campus hospital released their current number of patients assured the student body that nothing was wrong,

but the emails kept coming. and hysteria grew. I stayed to the side and watched. The masks were the best thing proxy could have offered us. People bought blackout curtains, took sleeping pills, avoided anyone who appeared to be tired. Somehow the disease morphed into a kind of fatal, infectious insomnia, and people started sleeping through classes. desperate to sleep more than enough, to avoid the illness, they stocked up on pills and alcohol and pot anything to make them tired. The administration attempted damage control, but the

emails kept coming. I continued to do my research, solidifying my theory. In place of my finals, I spent hours combing the internet, looking for symptoms, matching them, piecing them together into a final, awful picture. I made a trip into town to see a doctor I knew well and convinced him to write me a script for a medication. Meanwhile, the emails continued in a steady stream. Email stopped. The campus held its breath waiting.

The silence was deafening. We waited. They found his boss. body on the roof of the gym three days later. We saw the ambulance and fire trucks pull up and a huge crowd of us came to watch. No one told us that someone had died, but we knew. And we also knew that it was him, the student, we called proxy. No one spoke while his body was lowered off the roof in a bag.

As it was rolled into the ambulance bay, someone behind me, quietly pointed out the strange shape of the bag. The details came soon after. Proxie's real name was Oliver. He was a quiet sophomore who almost no one knew. After his death, his personal computer was taken away to be analyzed, and we heard nothing more about it. The email stopped, and although things calmed down,

many students still wore masks. They still tried to decode the messages Oliver left behind. Groups met up in the evenings in various dorms to talk about them and what they meant. He became a kind of cultural icon among these groups, a strange, unknown student who had inspired an entire school to fly into hysteria and had left us at the peak of his fame. The only things they knew about him, they gleaned from what little was available on the Internet. He was working toward an environmental studies major.

He loved computers and was evidently very proficient with him. He had a cat named Mo. No one knew what had happened to Mo. His life was picked apart and studied and turned over for any clues as to what had happened to him. I sat in on these groups and listened, never trying to steer anyone in the right direction. They'd know soon enough. Around two weeks after Oliver's death, people started getting sick. It started slowly at first.

The emails were largely forgotten by this time, save for a few select die-hard fans that clung to them. Here and there, students would get sick. drop out and go home to recover. It was close to the end of the year and we were all cramming for finals, so we hardly noticed that they didn't come back. Most people met up in the library in large groups to help each other study. I kept to myself in the silence of my room, and I listened to my neighbors. In class, I sat in the back and became a ghost,

picking up on any conversation I could hear. People started to complain of headaches, stiff necks, strange floating specks in their vision, like little sparks. The campus hospital started seeing an influx of these ailments and issued a mandatory vaccination for meningitis. We all received it, but the ailment continued to spread. The headaches, I heard, were soon. severe, even in sleep they could be felt, pounding in the front of the head and behind the

sinus cavities. People complained of eyes that bugged out their eyelids barely covering them anymore, and it was hard to see. There were frequent nosebleeds in class. It was now common for students to carry boxes of tissues to staunch them. The administration addressed this new influx of illnesses, advising students with symptoms to rest and avoid going to class. But finals were close, and most soldiered through what was being referred to as a flu. The girl who sat in front of me sent a text to her friend, which I read over her shoulder. Does your nose burn when it bleeds? It feels like I've been snorting glass or something.

Memory problems started to set in. Soon people were having trouble completing sentences. They looked terrible. Their eyes were bloodshot, terribly bugged out. Their faces were pale, sometimes smeared with blood from the nosebleeds that never seemed to stop. It wasn't uncommon to see these students wandering the campus blankly, having forgotten where they were going or where their dorms were. The administration sent out jumbled emails advising students that classes for the next week would be cancelled as the majority of staff was out with the flu. Drink plenty of see-through liquids and make sure to stay out of contact of those who are sick.

Classes will resume on May 3rd. I stopped attending classes. I took the bus into town and purchased a small stockpile of food, water, and toiletries. Then I locked my room, sealed the door in a C vent with duct tape, and began using a plastic bucket to collect my waist. When the bucket was full, I would open the window briefly and empty it outside. I sat in my room, surviving on my rations, and waited for the final stage, which I now suspected would happen very soon. Through the walls, I could hear my neighbors moaning, tossing in bed, occasionally vomiting, or moving in rhythmic patterns. Sometimes they talk to themselves.

Sometimes they just screamed. I lay in bed at night and listened to the move furniture around, trying to block out the light from the outside, then moving it so that they could leave their rooms and move up to the next floor, driven by a false flight instinct. When the electricity to the campus died, I popped batteries in my flashlights and camping lanterns. I kept my doors sealed, and I waited. Of May 5th, I woke to complete silence.

Knowing what had happened, I put on a surgical mask and unsealed my door. I followed the blood trails to the elevator, but I didn't take it. Instead, I took the stairs, followed the smeared handprints on the walls, up to the roof access, which had been propped open with a textbook. I went out the door and stepped onto the roof, but there was very little space to put my feet. I had to stand on a few fingers, but I doubted their owners would mind. On the roof and on every roof I could see from my position, the students and faculty had gathered together in a great mass.

Some were on their knees, some sitting Indian style. Others, the weaker ones, were cropped up on their friends. Their heads flopped back, mouths open. The birds hadn't gotten all of their eyes yet, though they were making fast work of them. They perched on the student's shoulders and ignored the strange, roundish stems that the optic nerves had become

in favor of the succulent cherry red berries on top. The student closest to me, a young man whose name I couldn't recall, had not yet lost his eyes, and I studied him closely. From the swollen, bloody sockets. The stalks of his nerves jutted upward, almost afoot. I could see the fibers had been torn from being forced to stretch so much, but the calcification prevented them from sagging

or breaking. The eyes themselves were full of coagulated blood, which made them bulge and weeped. His mouth gaped open and the blood from his nose had pooled in it. Bending down, I could see that his soft palate had collapsed, and in its place were a network of dark, slimy roots. The palate lay on his tongue, an almost bubblegum pink. I stood, looked at the collective mass of humanity, and the timer on my watch began to go off. I pulled a bottle out of my pocket and swallowed a pill dry. I put the bottle back and took a last look at the roof.

200 people, maybe more. Their heads tilted to the sky, their eyes on stalks. If I squinted, it was almost beautiful. A field of red berries. A crow settled nearby, called, and plucked one of the berries from the stalk. The berry popped in a gush of flu. that covered the crow's beak and chest. I took my leave.

On the drive into town, I composed the email that I would send from the police station. I would send it to all neighboring counties as well as the CDC. This was assuming, of course, no one else had figured it out yet. I would make it very brief. There was no room for poetry anymore. It is an airborne fungus.

a mutant strain. Mucous membranes are the first to be affected. If you were sick, it is too late. Resists the urge to go up. Do not spread your spores to other people or animals. Stock up on anything necessary. Find a room. Seal it completely.

Do not leave for any reason. Flucon is all. there are strange people out there who actually enjoy being scared? Oh, wait, of course you do. You're one of them. Well, so is author Matt Dimmerski, and he tells us about a group of friends who are fear junkies. Not satisfied with scary movies and podcasts,

they decide to try a new street drug, which is supposed to bring on waking nightmares. Sounds like fun, right? Performing this tale are Jesse Cornett, Jessica McAvoy, and Corinne Sanders. So don't bother with drugs. Just sit back and let this be your nightmare. Because, after all, we all love feeling scared. I used to love feeling scared, but after what I've seen, I'm just permanently numb.

My friends and I often played a self-scaring game where we'd visit purportedly haunted locations at night, take pictures, move around in the dark, and try to embrace fear as deeply as possible. It was our way of getting an adrenaline rush. Some people went skydiving and some people raced cars. But we purposefully scared the hell out of ourselves. Gabby was the biggest fear junkie out of all of us. She was the one most interested in taking photographs, too, as if she was intent on proving the supernatural actually existed. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I didn't actually think there was anything out there.

We'd been to century-old hospitals where tuberculosis patients had died en masse. We'd stayed the night in horrible prisons with the lights off. We'd even gone up to a spot in the woods where it was rumored a mass murder had taken place in the 1800s. Through all that, we'd never once seen anything out of the ordinary. It had always been fun, though, so when the dealer at a college party offered me something new, I immediately thought of Gabby. She scoffed when I showed her the little circular dark blue pills. Remy?

What the hell is Remy? Is that like Molly? No. I looked around the party to make sure nobody was watching us. It's new. My guy says it put you in an R.E.M. Dream state while still awake. That's why it's called Remy. Her weariness faded as she realized the implications.

Is it safe? I grin. I knew I had her interest. As safe, she grabbed our friend Kurt, and we were out the door without even saying goodbye to anyone else at the party, practically salivating over the prospect of this new adventure. What's the scariest possible place around here? Kurt, the most reluctant of our trio, shook his head. If we're really doing this Remy stuff, can we first try it somewhere normal? I don't want to freak out and get hurt or trapped or something.

I nodded diplomatically. Gabby sighed. Fine. She looked up and down the orange-lit street, taking stock of the random-lit. some scattered college kids on their way to and fro in the chilly night. How about here? Here? Like, in public?

I didn't see anybody acting crazy. Before we could all agree, she took one of the several I'd given her and downed it. Here goes nothing. Shrugging at Kurt, I took one too, and he joined in with trepidation. Nothing happened at first, and of course, I'd forgotten to ask how long it would take to kick in. You walk? Let's go get sodas at the get-go.

Something about her sentence felt a little odd. Was it already starting to have an effect? I walked alongside my two friends, studying the orange street lamps overhead and passers-by in the distance. That was the curious thing about dreams. You could never quite tell when they began. You were simply and suddenly there. I turned and saw a thin blonde girl standing in a nearby yard.

She waved me over. What's up? Behind me, Kurt and Gabby turned to look at her too. The more I looked at her, the more details seemed to become clear. Gray bottoms, a sweatshirt, a gaunt face. Wait, she shivered despite her warm clothes. You got anything I can eat? Anything at all.

I looked to Kurt, who shrugged and threw her an altoid from his pocket. She caught it, gulped it down without chewing, sighed happily, and vanished. I'm pretty sure all three of us screamed at the same time, more out of shock than fear. That triple scream seamlessly became laughter as we realized that the Remy was working. We'd all just dreamed a girl standing in a yard. Kurt's altoid sat in the grass, a tiny white speck. and dark, glimmering emeralds. But I was still awake and smart enough to realize that we'd all seen the same thing. Did this drug also cause people to share the same waking dream?

Or were we concentrating some false participatory memory? It was impossible to know, and our analytical abilities were deteriorating as the stoops and ramshackle undergraduate houses around us took on surreal qualities. Waking dreaming was its own clans. ass of crazy. With far more awareness than usual, I was able to see how my stream of consciousness constantly shaped and remolded everything around me. A house ahead grew taller, reminding me vaguely of an ancient Greek temple. It morphed into a weathered ancient Greek temple, reminding me of history and old things. It became a ruin. And then a house for medieval peasants, and then a booth from the Renaissance Fair.

Only once I drew close enough to really focus, did it stop changing and return to normal. Dreams operated at the edge of consciousness and direct concentration could dispel them. This is just cool, not scary. Gabby looked around with wonder. Her smile turned into an evil grin. So far.

She began walking faster. We kept up with her. Where are we going? There's an abandoned house two blocks over. Let's break in and see how scared we can get. That definitely sounded like a plan. Traversing a maze-like landscape of sidewalks, asphalt, cars, and houses that kept constantly changing in shape, meaning, and scope. We nevertheless made decent progress straight toward our destination.

We were still awake, after all, and there was always a long, narrow tube of reality wherever I decided to focus my eyes and awareness. We kept lookout while Gabby bashed in a low rectangular basement window with a rock. We carefully slipped down in one by one. It was only after I stood and looked around that dark, musty basement by dull indirect orange light that I realized I hadn't thought to look at the house's experience. exterior. I'd been too caught up in the shifting dreamscape to get a sense of what kind of building we were climbing into. The basement itself didn't look too strange. The gray dirt floor ran uniformly

around the cramped space, and we investigated nooks and crannies among the stone foundations for a time by the light of our phones. Look. I followed her pointing finger to a skull, partially buried in the gray dirt. Kurt laughed and poked it. Ha ha ha ha, ha. It looks so real. Under our collective gazes, it turned into a half-buried teapot.

Gabby looked positively hungry for more. Let's go upstairs. The creaking wood under our feet was oddly dark, and I put my phone light close, trying to figure out why. But the shades and animals, style of the steps kept changing, as if I was watching a movie and then a cartoon, and then a sketch, and then a comic. I fought down a wave of nausea and looked away hoping that this

trip wasn't about to turn bad. I froze at the top of the stairs. Oh, sorry. Four people stood within. A woman at the sink, a man at the fridge, and two kids sitting at the kitchen table. They all stood unmoving and stared at the three of us blankly, likely too shocked to react. Kurt held up his hands. Oh my God. Wrong house. Gabby stood between us all so warily still. I expected the father to call the cops or the kids to scream or the mother to angrily shoe us out of the house, but none of them moved. As always, Gabby was the first to suspect that something was wrong. She stepped to the side, at first just once, but then twice, and a third time. The family of four turned their heads and gazes to follow her, but none of them spoke a word

or otherwise moved. He was gripping my right upper arm tightly. The mother turned her gaze on him. Her expression still blank. I kept my eyes on the family while I slowly followed Gabby. I didn't care where we were going, only that we were going somewhere else. As such, we were halfway up the next oddly darkened steps before I realized we were not heading for some sort of split-level exit. I hissed. Pull here! She turned and looked back at me. Place burned down two months ago.

I kept looking at her, but my thoughts went to the dark stairs and walls, understood. Because they were charred. And the family in the kitchen? Kurt's grip on my arm became painful. He looked up at both of us fiercely. What the hell's going? Why am I dreaming of a family that died here? I didn't know about any dead family beforehand.

It's the dream state. We must be seeing things outside of normal perception. She turned and made a move down the second floor hallway. I caught her arm and for a moment all of us were physically connected. That's true. It's time to go home. Study this until we know more. Are you kidding?

What if it's a one-time deal? An accident of timing and biology? These are the big leaks. This is what we've always looked for. She darted off, disappearing into the shifting darkness and shade of the surreal second-floor hallway. Kurt let go too, fleeing in the other direction, back down the stairs. No, no, no, I can't. I'm sorry, I just can't.

Torn and suddenly alone, I watched Kurt swing around the charred banister pole at the bottom of the stairs and run out of sight. And then I turned to face the shifting and uncertain hallway. I had to believe Kurt would be all right since he was heading for the front door. Gabby, on the other hand, was heading deeper into the place where the living very much did not belong. I stepped forward into a swaying sense of something. subtle dizziness that hung about the second floor proper, and it took me a few moments before the slow back and forth and eerie creaking made sense. It felt like I was in the narrow hold of a boat,

but on what ocean were we drifting? The phone in my hand had become a small torch, burning with a dim white flame, and I held it before me as I cautiously opened the first door. It creaked horribly and then splintered away, too charred to function. A low rumble echoed through the hallway, and I slipped within the burnt room, feeling like I'd just barely avoided some sort of gaze or awareness coming around the distant corner. I leaned back against the wall, breathing hard but quietly, telling myself that it was just a dream, and one that I'd had often, for that matter. Throughout much of my life, in dreams, I'd fled that unhallowed awareness just around the corner,

always diving for safety just before it learned of my existence. They cast my side around the room. Why dolls? The good 40 odd, eerie little dolls with charred faces sat littered about the faded pink room in various pieces. Their eyes fixated on me from every angle. I stared. My pulse growing to a roar in my head until I was finally forced to breathe again. But they all seemed too damaged by the fire to move beyond them.

a soot-stained window that showed out only onto dark emerald fog. The subtle motion of our surreal ship became prominent in my limbs again, and I inched my way around the room to stare out through those darkened panes. Limitless black waters roiled just below at about the height of the first floor's ceiling, so it was just the second floor and above that were partially in another world then. I ducked down behind the bed, hiding among the glaring broken dolls as the awareness in the hallway brushed past. It paused on the broken door and perhaps even gazed in with some monstrous eye. But look!

Satisfied that the room was empty, whatever it was out there finally moved on. I gave it a good long minute before I climbed back on my feet and crept out into the hallway. Bears down. We're gone. replaced by a window onto green fog and dark waters. No matter. Gabby was the other direction, and I knew her well enough to skip the rest of the doors on the second floor. She would be heading straight for the attic.

It was about that moment staring at the slightly open door to another set of upward stairs that I began feeling more clear-headed. Looking back, I saw two images, one fading and one growing stronger. The horrible otherworldly hole I had crept down and a gaping burnt shell of a house with no solid second floor to speak of. I stood on an overhanging ledge of charred wood which was physically unreachable from the stairs in the distance. Implicitly I understood in that moment that I was not just dreaming.

The dream state had actually let us tread into something deeper. Some dark blister on reality that had bubbled, and festered into its own little nightmare. And in the real world, the attic door was closed and locked. Not that there was a choice, considering that I had no normal way down from my high and unstable location. I took another of the little circular dark blue pills from my pocket and swallowed it. I waited.

The swaying and creaking returned rather quickly, and I began to lose sight of the reel. Near my hand, the attic door was both closed and open, both closed and open. Both closed and open. And then, just open. Set loose like a runner at the start line. I pulled it the rest of the way and sprinted up the steps, scared by how long I'd left Gabby on her own. My white torch snuffed out as I moved straight up into a horizontal ceiling of absolute

darkness that hovered level with the top of the attic stairs, void nails that might be sticking down from the roof. The expansive space ran cool with drafts from the ocean air outside, and I used those drafts to inch along through the void. I felt melted plastic, soot, and charred wood with my fingers as I moved. This was still the burned-out attic. So why was it so and possibly dark. Gabby's whisper came from somewhere out in the abyss. Found her, taking in her meaning. Was he?

She shrieked suddenly, and then I heard Wood Creek in motion erupt from somewhere ahead and to my right. Crawling forward and grimacing for fear of nails, I sought out the noises of struggle and managed to grasp her flailing hand. She knew it was me immediately and pulled hard to escape something and crawl past me.

I was too slow. Painfully hot fingers that held the texture of overcooked hot dogs gripped my ankle, and my kicks did no damage to whatever my shoes were striking. The horrific stench hit my nose, barely preceding a charred corpse climbing on top of me. Grappling with the nightmarish arsonist, I fought with dreamlike strength.

That is to say none. For every hit felt like I was doing nothing at all. My efforts to fight back held no impact. The idea came to me in a flash out of my own fears. Instead of fighting off the unseen horror, I gripped his front and sighed and stood up as fast as I could. He groaned, gurgled, and convulsed, and foul-smelling goo hit my face from above. I didn't need to see him to know what I'd done.

Letting go, I moved away. free to leave now that he was pinned to the roof by dozens of jutting nails that had to be several inches long each. Gabby found my hand in the dark and we crawled our way to some sort of exit, but it was not the stairs back down. We emerged through a small hatch onto the deck of the nightmare ship proper. Here the green fog was thickest, lit only by a spectral glow from an unseen moon. Above us, a wooden platform rose to a crest, and on that platform a figure in silhouette stood. That silhouette's head and shoulders shifted as it slowly turned to look at us, and I found myself through at all, no matter how hard I tried. The effort only produced a subtle, dark, blue static along the outlines of my limbs.

we remained on our hands and knees. Two dark red points like zero-dimensional rubies with endless depth studied us for a moment. Were we going to die? Was it going to kill us? Who or what was it? We'd crawled through a dead family's unending nightmare and a child arsonist's private hell to find what?

Bibi eyes shifted away, facing ahead again. and I was suddenly able to move. It began to point straight ahead at some distant approaching destination. The emerald fog around us roiled in a new breeze and began to slide away. I pulled Gabby back toward the hatch, but she resisted. Her eyes gleamed by the spectral moonlight. She crawled out of my immediate grasp as I remained at the hatch back to the real world. world. She pulled out the handful of dark blue pills I'd given her and downed them all in one

determined gulp. I have to know. I screamed at her, but she clambered to her feet and began to ascend the lay of the ship toward that figure. I thought to go after her. Still, even then, that awareness, larger and closer than ever, no longer just a stalking shadow of itself but real, present and grown nearer. Every almost encounter with it I'd ever had in dreams had been nothing but avoiding the smallest sliver of that ultimate terror which lay ahead on this dark ocean. That if I had ever failed to avoid it knowing of me,

that if I had ever gone around those dreamscape corners just a little bit slower and gotten seen in the utmost indescribable sense, I would have died in my sleep. Or worse, I actually see a shadow of the future in my mind, generated by my dream state. I could crawl back into that hatch and let Gabby find what she'd been seeking ever since her parents had died. But anybody in my world would ever see her again. I would live the rest of my life wondering if she was suffering an unimaginable fate all alone in... God knew wherever this was.

It was coming up over the waves. Heartbeat. We had mere moments. Screaming silently in my head, I abandoned my grip on that hatch, and I ran up the charred wood of that ghastly ship and tackled her. She struggled and bit and clawed at me, but I dragged her away.

There was no time for going back the way we'd come. The rising scream that shook the world reached a crescendo, as the ship tilted up along a massive wave preceding the unknowable beast. Those were dark enough to hide us from its sight. With an instinctual prayer expressed by a leap of heart in my chest, I pulled her over the side with me and we plunged down into the icy pitch. Down onto hard autumn chilled grass,

where her legs snap like a twig, and my arm shattered in four places. Of course we could never truly explain to anyone why we'd jumped from the roof of that burnt-out house. Kurt swore that his pill had worn off by the time he saw us fall out of thin air. I did my best to convince him it was the last effects of his dream state. My pills, I ground up underneath my shoe while I painfully waited for the ambulance to arrive. I sat by her side in the hospital, at least as much as they let me.

With no parents and no family, I was her emergency contact. And the confused doctor explained that he honestly had no idea what was wrong with her. She was unresponsive and wouldn't wake up, but unlike a coma patient, her brain activity was constantly very high. Coma patients never experienced REM sleep, almost by definition. But she was always in it and exhibiting signs of extreme stress besides. He'd never seen anything like it. It was. I'd only saved her body.

She'd overdosed on dreams and fear. And the rest of her was still there in that nightmare layer of reality. What she might have found, I'll never know. I've seen where it comes from. Nearly touched its source directly. Nearly had it become aware of me personally in return. And I have absolutely no desire to go back there before I see death a second time. And he drags me kicking and screaming into its inescapable maw.

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