The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S8E05

Episode Date: November 6, 2016

It's episode 05 of Season 8. On this week's show we have four tales about disease, drugs, and devilry."The Toy Box"† written by Leo Harrison and performed by Jesse Cornett & Kyle Akers. (Story starts around 00:03:00)"Hand of Glory" written by Colin Harker and performed by David Cummings & Dan Zappulla & Mike DelGaudio & Atticus Jackson. (Story starts around 00:32:00)"We Call Them Flesh Clowns"† written by Henry Galley and performed by David Ault & Kyle Akers & Atticus Jackson. (Story starts around 01:06:30)"The Black Tree"† written by Jacob Healey and performed by Mike DelGaudio & Matthew Bradford & Elie Hirschman & Nikolle Doolin & Addison Peacock. (Story starts around 01:35:20)Click here to learn more about the voice actors on The NoSleep Podcast Click here to learn more about the Sleepless Live 2017 Tour Click here to learn more about Colin Harker Click here to learn more about Henry Galley Click here to learn more about Jacob Healey Executive Producer & Host: David CummingsMusical score composed by: Brandon BooneAudio adaptations produced by: Phil Michalski† & Jeff Clement‡ & David Cummings"The Black Tree" illustration courtesy of Jörn HeidrathAudio 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. We're here to frighten you and mess with your head because that's what you want. So give in to your fear because tonight there will be no sleep. It's the no sleep podcast. I'm David Cummings. Thanks for joining us. On this week's show, we have four tales about disease, drugs, and devilry. We hope you all enjoyed a sweet and sleepless Halloween.

It was through bloodshot and bleary eyes that we looked back and realize that between our full-length free episode, our Halloween bonus episode, and the darkest night episodes we helped put out, meant there were almost five hours of audio Halloween treats for people and pumpkins alike. In fact, the month of October was our biggest and busy. month ever. In total, we put out 16 hours worth of content between free and bonus episodes. I want to publicly acknowledge and thank everyone on our team for going above and beyond to bring such a cornecopia of autumnal audio nightmares to your ears. Believe me, we're all rather tired right now. And before we start the show, I want to say a big thank you to those of you

who have already snatched up your sleepless tour tickets for our live shows next year. Ticket sales are impressive for the first week, and since most of our venues are rather, well, I'd say, intimate, I'd encourage you not to wait too long to get yours. And so, just because it's November, it doesn't mean the horror has to end. Here at the No Sleep podcast, it's Halloween all year round. So let's kick off more tales of horror. and start this week's show.

In our first tale, we recall the school days of a man who considered himself quite the rebel at his new school. As we hear from author Leo Harrison, he befriends a boy who secretly deals drugs in the school. Before long, he realizes there are more dangerous things than narcotics. Performing this tale are Jesse Cornette and Kyle Akers. So kids, just say no, especially when you're shown what's inside the toy box. Although I'm now 30 years old, there's an incident from my time in high school that still haunts me to this day. I've never told anyone the whole story as it really happened. Of course, the police heard bits and pieces just enough to know what they needed to know

regarding the events that killed three of my classmates, as well as four innocent victims. in 1998. But the police interrogation was over a decade ago. Tonight, I'm decided to record the entire story, exactly as I remember it. Maybe one day after I'm gone, this account will provide some sort of closure for anyone who decides to investigate the strange events that surrounded my classmate, Jason Antioch, between the years of 1997 and 1998. Or maybe my story will just read like the diluted ramblings of a psychotic former druggie. In August 1997, my parents enrolled me at St. Cecilia's Catholic High School, one of the more prestigious in our city.

A junior-level student, I was a perpetual outcast, a problem child prone to acting out. I'd been politely asked to leave one public high school at the end of my freshman year and outright expelled from another when I was a sophomore. So by forcing me to attend St. Cecilia's, my parents hoped that the strict Christian ethical and academic discipline enforced by the institution would straighten me out. Determined to prove to mom and dad just how wrong they were, I immediately began plotting my retaliation.

I still remember that first day of classes. I spent the half hour before first period sitting in my beat-up Pontiac, parked beside a gas station just down the road from St. Cecilius. I remember sweating in the glaring heat, uncomfortable beneath my uniform, white button-up shirt, and khaki pants. I smoked a cigarette nonetheless. A few kids, a bit younger, maybe in the grade below me, exited the gas station, clad in the same god-awful uniform as myself. I offered them a cigarette. At this, they said nothing, staring at each other as if I'd just asked them to hand over all their money.

Without a word, they turned and walked toward their car. Strike one. In my puerile and frustrated mind, I felt that corrupting the youth of St. Cecilia's would be easy fun. I was surprised, however, to find that the school was, in fact, already corrupted. There was an undercurrent drug culture, which centered around certain pills and psychedelics, anything that didn't show up on St. Cecilia's monthly drug test.

But even with these screenings in place, a lot of kids still smoke pot before school. The tests were a bluff, they said. But an aging question occurred to me as I sat through my first mandatory Eucharist on that first day of school. Where were all of these drugs coming from? Within my first week of school, this question was answered. Most of the narcotic, it turned out, came from Jason Antioch, a kid in my grade. Those who knew this kept it on the down low, as in the past. Plenty of students had gotten the boot from St. Cecilia's on mass for drug dealing,

all because of some loose lips. So the tweaked-out paranoid kid who told me about Jason also made me swear that I hadn't heard it from him. I laughed at how serious he was acting and didn't accept his plea in order to show dominance. If I'd known then what I know now about Jason, I don't think I would have laughed. I first met Jason Antioch at a polluted, sketchy park not too far from St. Cecilius. This park, situated just behind some low-rent condos, served as the school's unofficial smoke spot and makeout point, a general Friday night mecca for the outcast and alienated. Police officers regularly combed its beer-can littered woods.

rocks and trees were spray-painted, and although the park's official name was Jude's Place, the students of St. Cecilius had taken to calling it Judas's place. It was deep within these woods that I first saw Jason, sitting beside a shallow creek, his close circle of acquaintances surrounding him. They treated me with rude glares as I approached through the brush. Growing closer, I saw in the dim evening light that they were passing around a handle of vodka. They fell silent when I came near. Of course, this was natural.

The secretive nature of Antioch and his little operation had clued me in to the high likelihood that he and his friends would be suspicious of any stranger, particularly a new kid. Prepared for this, I sat down next to them and nonchalantly lit the joint I'd been carrying in my pocket. I took a drag and offered it to Jason. Now I'd be lying if I said that Jason didn't even. intimidate me. There was something deeply disquieting about him, and I knew from the moment I first exchanged words with him that our friendship would be purely opportunistic. You see, he wasn't as you might expect. No piercings, no black clothing, no tattoos. Rather, he looked normal and

clean cut. His face was soft and somewhat effeminate. His stature just tall enough to make him physically intimidating. But there was something about him, an aura, a vibe. He seemed like he was always hiding something. It was there in the woods that I first saw Jason play his games. It didn't take long for me to realize what was going on within this tight-knit social group. Jason had surrounded himself with fawning sycophants and vulnerable addicts who were on a far lower tier than himself in terms of emotional and social intelligence. Before anyone could say word to me, first Jason had to find something that he could insult about my appearance. So he made fun of my Metallica shirt, said they were a mainstream band for pussies. His friends erupted in laughter at this,

and, in a twisted way, the tension settled. I shrugged it off. If this was their form of initiation, so be it. That was the nature of Jason's games. He enjoyed turning people against each other in subtle ways. His second favorite activity to this was building people up to knock them down. He understood at a strange, intuitive level, how to use Pavlovian conditioning in order to control his relationships. Emotionally, his annex were a constant bait and switch. He was always flipping.

incentives, subverting rewards. I came to realize after a few weeks of associating with his click that all of Jason's friends were more or less victims of Stockholm syndrome. My project of getting on Jason Antioch's good side was made easier by my notoriety. When he learned that my name was Derek Thomas, and that, yes, I was indeed the Derek Thomas who tried to strangle that kid back at Franklin High, Jason seemed a lot less apprehensive about doing drugs with me. And eventually, he also seemed a lot less cautious about letting me sell drugs for him. Soon enough, I was making a good cut from Jason's setup, contributing to the fun that I'd later used to skip town and start a new life.

Working for and befriending Jason entailed visiting his house each weekend. I'll never forget the first time I went there. He lived in a lower middle-class neighborhood with his mother and father. Though his parents greeted me with fake smiles, I soon discovered that they were both alcoholics who constantly bickered at each other and gave little attention to Jason. As for Jason, his bedroom was adjoined to their basement. His room was full of high-tech shit, speakers,

video game consoles, and televisions, which he'd either bought with his drug money or else stolen. The only decoration was a tattered Playboy's centerfold taped to the wall adjacent to his bed. His two sets of shelves were lined with strange books. Most of them stripped of their dust jackets. Whenever I would leaf through them, I'd find that the contents were either pornographic or occult in nature. A majority of the books involved witchcraft and ritual magic. The mind games got a lot weirder whenever Jackson.

Jason and his friends would sit by themselves for hours on end in this claustrophobic room, tripping acid. There were no Pink Floyd albums or Lama Lamps. Instead, these late nights involve Jason's strange music, as well as even deeper levels of psychological programming at the expense of his friends, or rather, test subjects. I would watch with unease as Jason made his friends do things. He would march them around, involving them in what seemed to me like satanic rituals. And all of his friends, locked within their insular social bubble, had become convinced that this was perfectly normal. I think Jason understood that I saw through his operation.

Sometimes I think that maybe his letting me in on the drug dealing was a concession, intended to keep me from uprooting his influence. I don't know. But these days, I'm a little more convinced that he was just toying with me, as with all the others. It was just a higher level of deception. And I was too distracted by the madness of his friends to catch the subtleties in my own relationship with Jason. Everything changed for the worst one Friday night in December. I was at Jason's place and it was just the two of us, alone in his basement room, each stoned. To be honest, hanging out with Jason one-on-one was fine, fun, even. In these moments, I could almost consider him a friend. I didn't have to watch his social experiments and instead could just relax. This night, however, was different.

I remember that a particularly disturbing song had just come to an end. It was a loud song full of abrasive noise. Its lyrics told the story of a burn victim nicknamed the Hamburger Lady because of the way her skin looked. In the aftermath of the song, the room fell dead quiet. Jason had already been staring at me for a few minutes, waiting for the song to end. And now, amid the deep, eerie silence that lingered, he said something very strange to me. I want to show you all my little toys.

Perplexed, I began to prepare myself psychologically for some kind of trick or mind game. Of course, I'd have to do exactly as Jason said, and so I stood up when he stood up, following him as he walked from his room and into the pitch black basement. He led me to a door that I'd never even noticed was there. It was a small door, maybe about. half my height. We had to crouch to enter it, and it seemed to lead to a crawl space of some sort. I grew apprehensive and alert, the drugs doing little to help. I still remember how Jason

entered the doorway before I did, disappearing into the shadows. He asked me to follow. So, I followed. In the darkness, as I crawled on my hands and knees, I felt my fingers grace all sorts of coarse objects and filth these surfaces upon the floor of Jason's crawl space. The occasional soft or fleshy sensation convinced me that I was crawling over the corpses of cockroaches and spiders. I couldn't see Jason in the shadows and instead had to follow him based on the sound of his movements. Wordless, he just crawled onward, a few feet in front of me. I felt dissociated. At last, he came to a stop. A light flickered on, a single light bulb dangling from a chain. I said his name as he just sat there, quiet, perched like a cat on his hands and knees.

I wanted to know why he brought me here to the end of this mysterious, dirty crawl space. But he just sat there, holding that same feline position. I started to feel that same feline position. I started to feel that something was very wrong. After a while, he moved. He reached forward, dragging an inconspicuous wooden chest from a nearby corner. And then he turned around so that I could better see what he was holding. This is my toy box. His toy box.

He spoke like a child. I asked him what the big joke was, why he was acting even weirder than you. usual. At this, he just grinned. I think the first thing that I noticed were the noises. Yeah, there were noises coming from inside the toy box. At first it was hard to tell, but eventually I realized that it sounded like some sort of muffled sobbing or moaning. I kept listening, my heart racing, unsure as to whether or not I was hallucinating. Jason continued to hold that grin of his. After a minute or two spent listening to the bizarre sounds coming from Jason's toy box,

my acquaintance at last unlatched the chest. There, in the faint light of the crawl space, I watched as he opened the container and peered inside. What followed this, I will never forget. It's haunted me. Ever since, always showing up in my nightmares without fail. Jason reached into the chest and extracted something. Some little object.

I strained my eyes in the dim light, trying to make out just what it was that he was holding. But I couldn't see. His fingers were obscuing it. The noises, though, I heard the sobbing and the moaning intensify. They were no longer muffled. Whatever Jason had taken from his toy box, it was the thing responsible for these sounds. Finally, Jason unfolded his clasped hands, revealing what he held.

It was some sort of creature, all sinewy and contorted, tiny enough to fit in your palm, like a five-inch discolored newborn infant. I felt my eyes well up with tears. Felt my heart pounded in my chest. I felt sensations that I never knew to exist. They were primal. I asked Jason what the fuck I was looking at. He said nothing, simply leaving his hands outstretched as they were.

I looked on at the creature. just for a second longer. It was crying, screaming. It seemed agonized, its entire hideous form, writhing, and squirming in Jason's pale hands. It was somehow both mammalian and reptilian, yet delicate and wept like a frog. Its eyes were sealed shut. It was just screaming and screaming, rocking. back and forth like a fetus. What Jason said when I cried to him for an explanation,

I'll never forget that either. Become like gods. It's my creation. The things in life that scar people the deepest tend also to be the most unthinkable. If they were commonplace and predictable, then these traumas wouldn't be so shocking. What Jason showed me that night surpassed the unthinkable. I left his house as fast as I could, my motor control returning in the face of terror. I crashed about his basement, fumbled up the stairs, made my way out the front door. I don't even know if I closed it behind me.

I didn't look back. When I got home that night, I sat in my room and stared at my raw, reddened hands. I'd walked three miles in the freezing snow. It was 4 a.m. I didn't sleep that night. Couldn't sleep because of the drugs. Not that I would have anyways. At dawn, feeling manic from the cocktail of hallucinogens and sleep deprivation,

I drove my car to an ATM at the strip mall down the street and checked my balance. The drug money. I'd saved enough of it to skip town and never come back. Even though I'd been planning to leave that next summer, what was the difference really? I wondered. I'd wanted to finish high school so I could retain the option to pursue community college sometime in the future. But I couldn't think straight after what Jason had shown me. I just wanted out.

I wanted away from him. So I finally got my proper night's sleep, 50 miles out of town at a Super 8-Mobile. I was running away. I still haven't been back to my hometown, haven't talked to my parents in ages. I don't know if they miss me or not. That night in the motel, I dreamt about the creature. Nothing else. When I saw a couple of squad cars parked outside my scrappy apartment complex in Manitoba about two years later, I somehow knew that it had to do with Jason. Fantastic timing, too. I paid the strung-out prostitute and told her to leave through the fire escape.

A minute later, there came a knock at my door. It had been two years since Jason led me to his toy box on that frosty December night. Now, I watched the pine trees whizz by from my view in the backseat of a cop car. We parked outside a tiny station lifted straight out of Twin Peaks. and the officers took me inside. In the back room of the station, a man from the FBI was waiting for me. We sat at a long conference table

and he poured me a cup of coffee. He told me that I probably wasn't in trouble depending on what I could tell him. I listened. First, he treated me to a personal question as he leaped through my file. Why'd you strangle that kid all those years back? I told him the truth.

Charlie, that was his name. He'd been messing with my ex. I didn't really care, but still felt something needed to be done. So I cornered him one day by the dumpster in the back of the school, and that was that. He'd been all right. It'd never been my intention to kill him. I just wanted to see him scared. You can't snake around in life like that without getting the shit kicked out of you.

Once in a while. Shortcuts are risky. He had to learn his lesson. You know? The investigator's curiosity, now satisfied, he asked me if I knew why the cops had brought me here. I said no, not really, despite my intuitions. It went on to explain. A month ago, seven people had been murdered in my hometown. Two were the parents of Jason Antioch. They died in a house fire, now proven an act of arson carried out by Antioch himself. Two more victims were Erica and Jack Laverne, a married couple who returned home late one Friday night to find three armed assailants waiting for them in the darkness, all three of them wearing animal masks. The Laverne couple had been ambushed and killed.

The three intruders, the killers, were Robbie McCormick, Tanner Smith, and Rubin Gets. I knew them. They were Jason's friends. My friends! They committed ritual suicide after killing the Lavernes. And so, who was the seventh fatality, I asked? Who died last? Surely it was Jason.

No, a homeless man was found dead outside a motel, not far from the Laverne's residence. The DNA tested out as that of McCormick, Smith, and Gets. A senseless killing happened just before the other one. They must have done it on the way there. I felt puzzled. Although it was obvious from what I knew that Jason was involved in all of this, I immediately wondered what had become of him. Had he been arrested?

Well, the reason I'm talking to you, Mr. Thomas, is that we've yet to apprehend Jason Antioch. During my year-long trek around the United States in Canada, back in 98, I ran into a lot of terrifying situations. I was mugged multiple times, stabbed, once, and left a bleed in a freezing dark alley. At a podunk in Idaho in some filthy den, I watched three people, OD on heroin, hearing that Antioch was still on the loose. I almost shit myself.

The FBI wanted to know if I'd seen Jason, if I'd harbored him. On suspicion, they eventually searched my home. Thank God I'd been clean for five months or I would have been arrested. Soon enough, the FBI realized that I was no use to them for the time being. I gave them my side of the story, minus the part about the toy box, of course. That was all I had to give them after all. They left town, told me to inform the local authorities if Antioch ever contacted me. I agreed, unsure as to whether or not I was being honest.

I'm 30 years old now. and I don't read the news. So to this day, I'm still not sure if they ever caught Jason. But I do know in the States, his legacy has become something like that of a second Charles Manson. It's become popular knowledge

that Antioch conditioned his friends to perform the murders. Those three kids were led to believe through ritual, indoctrination, and psychological manipulation that Satan incarnate would arise as soon as the Lavernes were sacrificed. The three killers believed that, after offing themselves, they'd get to take a favored seat in the Dark One's kingdom on Earth. Anyways, I'm no longer bothered by the fact that the FBI may have never found Jason Antioch. I feel safe where I am because I eventually left Canada.

I'm living in Holland now. It's a very beautiful place. But I had to leave Canada. Had to. You see, not long after the FBI questioned me in Manitoba back in 1998, I found something. It had been a late night at work. I stumbled through the door to my apartment, tossed my keys upon the mantle, and collapsed into bed. When I awoke at daybreak, I rose grogily.

Though the sun was shining, my blinds were drawn. The room was dark. I made my way over to the light switch. It was what I saw when I turned on the lights, what I saw on the floor of my apartment, that made me leave Canada behind for good. I had to rub my eyes for a second and squint. It was hard to tell it first. But when I brought my face up close to the tiny, oily smudges that dot at the floor,

I suddenly understood little footprints. There were little footprints all over my apartment, maybe two inches in diameter, not just one pair. But many Jason's toy box. I emptied my savings once more and got the hell out of Manitoba. You can meet some interesting characters and hear some legendary tales if you visit a small town diner. Just ask author Colin Harker. He recounts what a diner patron shared one night and his story seems a little too real to be a tall tale.

I join Dan Zapula, Mike Delgadoio, and Atticus Jackson in performing this tale. So decide for yourself if there's any truth to the legend of the hand of glory. I walk into the diner, wipe my hands on a sheaf of napkins I pull from the dispenser, and sit at the side of the counter close by the kitchen. Just in time to hear this guy to the right of me wearing a cab driver's cap, turn to his partner, and say, Mama Grandi wants us to move the family to another part of town. It's just getting too damn dismal in the lower sticks.

His friend nods, pulling a long face. Yeah, a place will make you want to get a habit yourself, just so you'll have something else to worry about besides the junkies and muggers banging around your apartment building at two in the morning. Didn't some kid get his eyes stabbed out last week by the old church? Chee. Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood. I coughed to get the waitress's attention.

The taxi driver and his friend both eyeball me with cold, unforgiving looks, as though it was my sinister purpose to interrupt their lamentations. Gotta move the kids out of the lower sticks. This time there's an edge of aggression in his voice. He's daring me to interrupt him again. I nod pleasantly in his direction while the waitress sloppily sets a coffee in front of me. A thin man sitting on my other side, face dry and taut, his mouth drawn tight as a thread, clears his throat. He could be the grandfather of a herd of healthy mountain children.

He could be a recluse with a closet full of human skins. It could go either way. His eyes flicker for a moment when he sees that he has our attention, and then they go dead again. His voice is inflectionless, flat is static. But we listen. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Down in the lower sticks, one, two years ago, I hear of this boy, Stephen Donette,

who was wild about two things, junk and cash. He's wild about the cash because it gets him junk and a place to stay for the night. And he's wild about the junk because it gives him something. to do between hustling up the cash. That's what you call a destructive habit, son. I'm guessing he says this to me as one of his eyes is fixed on my throat.

I look down at my coffee guiltily and nod for him to continue. He takes the junk any way he can, snorts it, shoots it up. You know what I'm talking about. Across from him in the same apartment lives a night. another boy, a few years younger. This one's name is William Prey. This William, he's no junkie, but he is a sex fiend of the highest order. They say you could start a business with the videotapes and equipment that boy has. Sometimes he brings up girls, but most nights he's alone and you can hear the sounds of the tapes, and that's it.

He's a good-looking kid, not like this Stephen, who has chemicals junking up his veins. Maybe he thinks he's too good for what he's found on the street so far. The cabby and his friends start to shift in their seats. I glance at them and realize for the first time that they've heard this story before, but they are grinning uneasily for. ear to ear just the same, shivering with anticipation, and I can actually see the hairs begin

to rise on their arms. I'm interrupted in my obscene gopping by the storyteller, who takes me by the chin with the hand that feels like sandpaper and turns my gaze back to him. His face isn't reproving, it's just an eerie blank. Now, one thing I always forget to mention about Stephen, there's something that else that gets him off besides junk and cash, and that is hocus pocus stuff. I mean Alistair Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, Simon, and all that crap. He doesn't actually read the stuff, but he learns what he can from what he catches on the history channel in motel lobbies, or hears downtown Palm Reader's mutter. There's no mention,

method or rationale to what he remembers and uses. If it sounds useful or disgusting, it sticks. Time comes when his luck starts to run out, however. Cops are starting to recognize him and run him off the street. Tell him not to loiter. Ask him what his business is everywhere he goes. He's no good at mugging, and now that he can no long snatch purses in stores or stations, he begins to run low on cash. Pretty soon the dealers start to look the other way too. They know he doesn't have enough to trade for junk, and so they have no truck with him any longer. He spends his days lying in bed with the shakes, listening to the sound of Williams' videos

from across the hall and biting at his wrist, hoping, that the pain will keep the craven at bay. He gets a lot of hallucinations, some of them pretty funny, like a monkey hopping and chattering around his bed, and some of them ugly, things he's seen out of those shows, like upside-down crosses and butchered lambs.

He starts to remember some really weird stuff that he's heard of, like black masses performed on a naked woman's body and spells that make milk go sour. One thing, a weird old legend from England, sticks particularly in his head. The tale of the hand of glory. A dried hand that thieves in Shakespeare's time would cut from a hanged man's body. A hand that can unlock any hand that can unlock any. any door lead you to treasure and keep everyone in the house asleep while you go about your business.

But you can guess how many men the state hangs these days. Really whacked out of his mind, Stephen decides to wander out one night, hoping that he can nag some dealer into giving him a supply on credit. It's a ridiculous scheme, but he's not. not thinking with any part of him that's rational. It's his veins, empty of junk, that are thinking for him, and it's a wonder that with the buzzing in his ears, he notices how quiet it is in William's apartment. He pauses then for a moment outside the door and listens, not sure that this isn't another hallucination. Now he does begin to be able to. He says,

to hear something, but it doesn't sound like the moans or screams that he usually hears. It sounds gray, monochrome, inhuman. He tries the doorknob and it turns. Without thinking, he steps inside. Gah, what a fucking idiot. The cabby has the expression of a guy who's heard this routine. a million times, but always half hopes that something will change in the billion-threatling of it. Gotta be another version of this story somewhere. The half-hearted grin hasn't left his face. So he goes inside and the first thing that hits him is that the lights are all turned off. There isn't anything shining in that room except the television screen and it's just shimmering with static.

He looks around for some sign of William, but all he sees at first is the dirty rug, the threadbare couch, the rows of empty glasses on the coffee table. It's only after a long, stupid minute that he finally looks up and notices what's on the other side of the room. You know those fold-out screens that women sometimes like to hide behind while. they undress, the kind you see in those old movies they play late at night on AMC. William has one of those. Only his is made of red canvas with oriental patterns embroidered onto it, leaves and flowers. Something stains one of the patterns, a thick streak that looks crimson by the light of the quivering static.

Slowly, Stephen's gaze travels up the length of the screen to what's behind it. He sees the back of a head, tilted at a crazy angle, the knotted coil of noose, like a brown jungle snake around his throat, the length of rope hanging totly from an overhead beam. None of what he's seeing makes any sense to him. He's got the shakes too much to think of calling the police, but he's too bewildered to go back to his room and dream about junk. Instead, he goes up to the screen and begins to circle it. The tips of William's shoes are brushing the carpet very gently in a swaying circular motion. An upturned chair lies several feet away.

A pair of scissors, enormous and silver, are on the floor just beneath him. Stephen isn't thinking about this, though. His junk-addled brain is already distracted by the thought of what an opportunity this is. He couldn't care less that the guy across the hall killed himself, but if there's any loose cash or junk stashed under a pillow or in a drawer, Stephen wants to be the first to find out before the police arrive. He searches the place from top to bottom, finds a few loose dollars, but they don't add up to much. Sweating, he moves to the bedroom, pulls drawers out, flings them on the bed, rips open pillowcases, prodding them for hidden junk.

Finally, he gets to the clock. and that's where he gets his first shock. On the floor is a pile of nooses and each one is frayed at the end. All of a sudden, he thinks back to the scissors that he found on the floor and begins to shiver. He feels close to arriving at some sort of climax, some kind of epiphany, but his brain feels foggy and the harder. he tries to understand, the more incapable he is of understanding. Besides, the adrenaline rush of his search for cash or drugs has him numbed. If he can't shoot it up or shove it in his pockets, he doesn't see it.

He pauses to take a sip of water. Finally, he gives a wet cough and draws the back of a hand across his mouth. So he heads back to the living room and all the while this funny idea keeps running through his mind. See, he actually feels pretty pissed at poor dead William right now, has actually begun to hold him responsible for all his troubles. And he keeps thinking of the hand of glory and how you cut it off a hanged man and he begins to wonder if it's true, and how many times he'll have a chance like this in the future.

He goes into the kitchen and finds a steak knife. For the first time, some weird ray of lucidity must hit him when he sees what he's holding, because he suddenly drops it so loud that someone passing outside William's apartment hears the sound and stops by the door, asks if everything's all right. The door's still ajar, you remember? Not very steadily, Stephen calls out that everything's fine.

A silence and then footsteps. The intruder is gone. And then Stephen notices the second funny thing. that evening. Don't know if I mentioned it before, but when Stephen first came in through the front door, William was hanging from the ceiling with his face turned away, and only the back of his head visible. Well, when Stephen steps out of the kitchen, knife in hand, he takes one look at William and is this close to throwing the knife down and running out the door, hand or no hand? See, somehow the body twisted itself around,

and for the first time Stephen gets a good look at William's face. And that's when he feels his blood actually run cold, like someone has covered his heart with a stone. Because above the crooked tilt of that broken neck, above the knot of rope at his throat, the boy is grinning at him. And he realizes with an awful sinking feeling that he'll never forget this look as long as he lives. He still goes to William, knife in hand, but he can't take his eyes off that face. It's like he's afraid it'll come alive if he looks away for even a second. The eyes are livid, reflecting the static from the television.

The downward pressure has made his face go white, but his lips are twisted into this fixed, open, agonized smile, and Stephen looks at the red screen and sees again that trickle of something thick, and white stain in it. And he realizes all of a sudden that this isn't a suicide he's seeing. This is some kind of horrible accident. The boy's done this to himself before. Again and again, this is how he gets off.

But something went wrong and he didn't cut himself down in time. and so he came and died. And in a weird way, the unexpectedness of this makes Stephen nervous again about what he's doing. Maybe it ought to make him feel better that at least the boy wasn't so miserable that he wiped himself, that it was all just the result of an accident. But instead, Stephen's wondering now if this will even work. anymore. If this sort of hanging even counts, and now he just wants to get the hell out of Williams' place, away from the cracklin television and that stiff suspended body. But as the first rush of

blood starts to web from him, he begins to feel the shakes again, and this time they're worse than they've ever been, so bad that he coughs and wretches his sickness out on the carpet, and even after he's finished, he still feels like coughing out his insides. And he knows that if he leaves, there's nothing waiting for him back in his own apartment, nothing but the hell of wanton and not having. The carving knife is still in his hand, and he takes. takes one of William's hands, the left one, and begins to cut into it. A little blood flows, but not much.

It's harder to cut through bone than Stephen thought it would be. He finally somehow manages to dislocate the wrist from the rest of the arm through a combination of sawing and wiggling at it. finally it dislodges and falls sloppily into his own hand that night he doesn't get the usual visions and hallucinations he sleeps so completely that he doesn't even hear the police come and go doesn't hear his neighbors gossip in the hallways about what they found in william's apartment of how the cops would have said it was either suicide or what they call accidental asphyxiation if it weren't for the hacked-off hand. He hears later that they put it down to some sort of ritual murder.

There are lots of pretty fucked up cults in the lower sticks, and since they don't have any fingerprints to go on, the cops just dismiss it and move on to the next disaster area. Stephen spends that afternoon in the library, writing down notes from every book that he can find on the hand of glory. Finally, come twilight, he heads back to his place, William's hands still in the mini-fridge, wrapped in plastic beside a week-old sandwich and a beer. He stares at it for a long moment before finally getting up the nerve to, take it out. It feels like holding a dead animal, roadkill. A load seems to lift from

his stomach once he's dropped the thing onto the sheet of wax paper that he's spread out on the counter. He squeezes the hand until he's drained as much blood as he can from it. Then he puts it in a dirty casserole dish, sprinkles it with salt and other herbs just like the book said, and then puts it in the cabinet beneath his oven. He ignores the smell and waits two weeks before taking it out again. Then he lays it out on the window sill, lets it cook in the sun for a day, and says something in Latin over it like a prayer before going to bed. At about two in the morning, He starts awake from a dream so awful that he's shaken worse than he ever did from the mere lack of junk. He thinks he sees William Prey coming to him out of the shadows of his closet.

The noose is still tied around his throat, connected to him organically like a ropey umbilical cord. The writhing end of it vanishes into the darkness somewhere above his head. As William moves to the side of Stephen's bed, there's this rushing, whoosh, whoosh sound, because his feet are sweeping instead of walking across the floorboards. And he points to Stephen with his right hand, because his left hand is just a bleeding stump and tries to talk, but all that comes out is this fast history. and intake, outtake of breath. It's like he's trying to make articulate speech like a living man,

but this is all he can manage, a replay of his last sounds. Taste and bile, Stephen manages to roll over out of the bed, and when he fumbles for the switch and the lights flicker on, there's no one in the room but himself. After one shock, your whole body is alive to just about anything. It doesn't take much to set it off. So while he's sitting there in the dark, trying hard to focus on the sound of traffic out his window,

of his neighbors fighting or fucking all those brutal, ordinary sounds, he hears the soft thud of the hand falling from the kitchen window into the sink. and that little noise makes him shriek as if someone set a hot coal between his eyes. White and trembling, he gets to his feet and goes to the sink. The hand is just lying there, the faucet dripping on it every few seconds. It's so dry and parched that it no longer looks real anymore, like a piece of gnarled leather, an alien replica of a human hand.

For a minute, Stephen imagines that he hears the whistling breath behind him, but after a breathless moment, he concludes that it's just the water pipes. He screws the faucet tighter, shutting off the monotonous drip, and takes the hand out, studies it. It's like he's holding the molting of a dame. dead insect or snake. He knows it's dead, but he's terrified that he might be wrong and that it'll come alive in his own hand. He thinks his heart might stop if it does. You know the drill. He takes the hand, takes a lighter, brings them both together and lights the tip of each finger. His own hand is shaking so hard he wouldn't know if William's dead hand tried to squirm free. He's dry sobbing, so violent. If the ghost screamed in his ear at the kiss of fire, chances are he wouldn't hear.

Next day, Stephen's friends catch him with a canary munch and look and ask him what happened to land him in such good temper. Well, for one thing, you could fly a kite. with the amount of junk that's sailing through his veins. He gave them a grinning look and said he's got sources, an inside finger, as it were. He's found enough cash, enough dope to keep himself for quite a while. When they ask how we manage this, he doesn't even bother lying. He tells them the whole hand of glory nonsense, tells them, Now the hand not only leads him to cash, but junk as well.

He says it actually burns green when it gets close to a stash of the stuff. Well, his friends don't really believe all this spooky shit, but they believe in the junk, and when they figure that it seems not right for Stephen to be scoring so richly while they have to go slum for it like the rest of the fiends. They say that if he doesn't get them some by tonight, they'll go to the police with his story and tell them how he murdered William for his hand. This soberes him up some, and he starts to backtrack, contradicts himself, says at one minute that he made the whole thing up, then says that he's not even sure the hand will help him find junk again. They ask him what makes him think this, that he's just trying to worm out of his duty to them,

and he only says that sometimes it will lead him down alleys, filthy with newspaper and used needles, until he finds himself up against a wall, all messy with centipedes and roaches crawling all over each other, mating. Other times it makes him go in. to condemn buildings, places where the floors are rotting out, and the foundations ready to swallow up anything with a gravity pull, and stands him by a rotted out window, several stories high, showing him the prospect. Well, what do you expect from deciding to use the hand to some pervert, anyway, who knows what he did with it before you came along, you dim fool?

Ever thought of that? They get up and leave him, but not before getting him to promise that he'll bring them something by the end of the day. And he whines and asks them to give him an extra day, because he can never tell what mood he'll find the handy in this afternoon. Shrugging, they say, sure, sure, and leave him to it. Next thing anyone hears of Stephen is when the police get a call from 273 Benway Street, someone reporting a burglary. The guy who answers the door, an old man in a dirty bathrobe, says he don't know what woke him,

but he started awake in the middle of the night and when, went downstairs, and that's when he noticed that someone had smashed the kitchen window. Well, you actually missing anything? The cops ask. And what's eating at you anyway? You look like a mess. Old man scratches his dry, balding head. Funny dreams, he says. And yeah, I checked in a lot of cash I kept hidden around the house. is missing. Cops go to the window. It's smashed pretty badly.

Glass all over the place. Potted plants and soil covering the kitchen floor. How the hell you sleep through all this? Don't know. Like I say, funny dreams. Like the ones where you fall. Only in this one I couldn't breathe either. Like I was drowning or something.

And your front door was unlocked? No, locked as always. That strikes them as odd, since if the burglar made an escape, he'd either have had to go out the front door, the easiest way, or leave through the window again, probably skinning himself on all that jagged glass on the way out.

Something looks off about this whole thing, They decide to search the place, make sure that the thieves actually cleared out. Everything looks fine until they notice that the attic trap doors hanging open. They tell the old man to wait while they head up to see what's going on. Cash papers the floor, cash and junk. The place is green with it. One cop makes a sound of disgust. A severed human hand, a fingertip still smoking, lies by his foot. He kicks it out of the way without thinking until his friend makes noises about tampering with evidence. Nothing else is there except an old wardrobe. They guess they better open it. Make sure that he's not hiding. And that's how to be. they find a Stephen Donette.

The way I hear it from the papers and the word on the street, he's hanging by several strands of red sewing thread and barbed wire from a rusty nail. The threads and wire are pulled so taut and vicious that his throat's raw, bleeding and open. They later find out that between his own weight and the pretexts, pressure of the wires, his head was cut almost clean off. But the wires probably took so long to cut into him that the poor dumb fuck hung there for a good minute or even longer before choking on his own blood and dying. But that's not what they're looking at. They're looking at the dead

junkie's face and feeling their flesh begin to creep because there's this grin on it, like something they've seen before down in the lower sticks on the face of another boy. Only what would another one be doing in an old man's attic wardrobe. Funny place for a suicide, they think. Only it don't look like a suicide either. Well, they say, taking one last long, unhappy look at that face, at that doubly, stiff body. Some folks will do anything for a kick. The man pushes back his hat and looks at us long and emptily. One of the guys behind me starts to chuckle nervously.

Ho-wee! What a climax. How long ago did this happen, and were those really their names? Don it and pray? The guys smirk at each other before looking to the man, lapping up his reaction. Kid, you're sloppy. He takes my tie, his gloved fingers dry and soft as mortician cloth, and pulls it awful tight to my throat. That's better. We watch him head out, nervous smiles on all of our eyes. faces and shut up long enough to fill ourselves with coffee. The cabby waits for a

fresh batch of customers to seat themselves at the counter before telling me with the barely concealed wink loud enough for all to hear. You know boys, Mama Grandi thinks we should get out of town. It's just getting too damn dismal in the lower sticks. Your time in our netherworld into your own reality. If you would like to find out how you can hear the full-length versions of our audio program, please visit the no-sleep podcast.com to learn about our season pass program. 25 episodes, each over two hours long, and three exclusive bonus episodes, all for only 1999. On behalf of everyone at the No Sleep podcast, we thank you for listening. Join us again next week when our unseen hands will drag you down

into our dark storyland. This audio production is copyright, 2016, 2017 by Creative Reason Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. The name The No Sleep Podcast is a trademark of Creative Reason Media Inc. No duplication or reproduction of this audio program is permitted without the written consent of Creative Reason Media, Inc. Thank you.