The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S9E06

Episode Date: June 11, 2017

It's episode 06 of Season 9. On this week's show we have five tales about sinister sounds, sluggish slime, and severe separation. "The Final Party" written by Olivia White and performed by Nichole Goodnight. (Story starts around 00:03:30) "When I Died"† written by Lauren Lutz and performed by Addison Peacock & Kyle Akers & Erika Sanderson. (Story starts around 00:14:50) "Change"‡ written by Henry Galley and performed by Jessica McEvoy & Nichole Goodnight & Atticus Jackson. (Story starts around 00:34:00) "Snails"† written by Alex Grey and performed by Erika Sanderson. (Story starts around 01:11:11) "The Smiling Ones on Space Station Mir - Part 2"† written by Darius Pilgrim and performed by Mike DelGaudio & Jesse Cornett & Kyle Akers & Atticus Jackson. (Story starts around 01:28:00) Click here to learn more about the voice actors on The NoSleep Podcast   Click here to learn more about the new novel, "The Black Farm"   Click here to learn more about Darkest Night   Click here to learn more about Olivia White   Click here to learn more about Henry Galley   Click here to learn more about Alex Grey   Click here to learn more about Darius Pilgrim   Executive Producer & Host: David Cummings Musical score composed by: Brandon Boone Audio adaptations produced by: Phil Michalski† & Jeff Clement‡ & David Cummings "Snails" illustration courtesy of Naomi Ronke Audio program ©2017 - 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 storytelling podcast. Our tales are dark and disturbing, intended to shake you up. Listen at your own risk. We are all around you. And tonight's there will be, 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 six. sinister sounds, sluggish slime, and severe separation. On June 13th, which may be today, if you're listening to this a few days after its release, the No Sleep podcast will be celebrating its sixth anniversary. It's the sixth month of the year, it's episode six, and it's our sixth anniversary. Seems appropriate that three sixes are somehow involved in this devilish delight. Six years. so hard to fathom all that's gone into those years.

Suffice to say, I am immensely grateful for the multitude of contributors who have joined me on this journey, and to all who have listened to us over the years. As we set off into our seventh year, we have lots of exciting things in store, new projects, new collaborations, and quite possibly another live tour. So stay tuned, buckle in, and of course, stay sleepless.

Speaking of being sleepless, I know many of you love the story we adapted for the podcast called Feed the Pig by Elias Witherow. Well, I'm happy to announce that Elias has completed his novel titled The Black Farm, which expands upon and delves into the world of the Feed the Pig story. A couple, Nick and Jess, unable to cope with the misery that fills their days, discover that the world beyond this life is not the idyllic. piece that many suggest. Nothing could prepare them for the nightmarish reality found in the Black Farm. Check the show notes for links to where you can purchase your own copy of this entrancing new novel. And finally, I hope all of you by now are aware that the Darkest Night podcast has kicked off its second season.

The mysterious research of Project Cyclops continues, so join in and head over to Darkest Nightpod.com to find out all the details. And so, with six full years under our belt, a great new novel just waiting for you, and a fantastic podcast ready for your ears, I think it's time we start this week's show. David, wait. Oh, hi, Nicole. Oh, it's Nicole. Good night, ladies and gentlemen.

Hi, everyone. Sorry to interrupt, but before you start the show, I have another podcast to recommend. Well, that's fine, I guess. I mean, I usually ask you to submit requests like these in writing. You know, go through the usual channels and all that. Yeah, yeah, whatever. I can't wait for the paperwork to go through. Our listeners really need to know about this podcast.

Okay, what's it called? I'll check it out and see if it's worthy of our coveted recommendation. It's called The Final Party. It's really freaking good, and I'm kind of hooked on it. The final party. Right. Okay, I'll look into it and get back to you in a week or two. David, no. Step aside, and I'll tell everyone about it. My friend, Olivia White, told me about it. You see, I've always been a big fan of ARGs and forthwhile breaking horror and metanarrative and stuff. And this podcast is super good for that. I have no professional or financial connection to this podcast.

I just want to clarify that. I'm just a big fan. I don't work. on it, I'm stuck at no sleep. I don't know who does work on it, actually. They don't have any kind of social media presence. No Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. I found a few fan pages, but they don't seem to be official and nobody knows the details of who's behind the show itself. It surprises me they have so many subscribers. Generally, podcasts seem to need to promote the heck out of themselves on social media. The narrator has a very familiar voice. At first, I wondered if he was someone from the horror narration community, but I can't seem to place him. He's got that sort of sultry, vaguely menacing British voice

that some of the best male horror narrators can pull off really well, but there's something extra about him. Like, I swear this guy wouldn't sound out of place in Hollywood. I wish I knew what his name was. I'd love to listen to more of his work. On the show, he just calls himself the host. I guess that fits, really. the podcast is kind of hard to describe for anyone who hasn't listened to it,

which is why I'm reaching out to other fans on here, so maybe we can get a discussion going before tonight, which I'm really excited about. So like basically, each episode takes place at a party. At first I thought it was the same party, and I guess in a way it is, the final party, but the location seems to change every episode. A group of friends show up to a party

and generally start having a good time. It's always some kind of decadently decorated basement location from the way that they describe it, plenty of booze on hand, dim lighting, music playing from the unseen speakers. And here's where the really cool part kicks in. After we hear the partygoers shooting the shit with each other for five or ten minutes, the host shows up.

He tells them the theme of the party and it's always something really fucking creepy or horrible. Some of my favorite episodes have been, Well, there was an episode where there's a dead body hidden around the party, and guests have to find the dismembered body parts and piece together the victim. The big reveal at the end of this one was that the victim was the sister of one of the characters, and they all freaked the fuck out when they found her head inside the disco ball. Personally, I love that pitch.

The episode where the guests are served pizza and first to eat it on pain of death for all of them, and one of the slices is laced with extremely fast-acting poison. and it's sort of a game of Russian roulette to see who eats the poison pizza. It's a boy called Craig, whose girlfriend absolutely freaked when he vomited up his insides. An episode where the guests have to decide among themselves which member of the party they're going to drown in a bathtub, this one had a brilliant twist because they finally decided to kill this one guy who they all think is a bit of a dick. But when they do, it turns out that the bathtub is filled with acid, and the murders get their arms burned off too. really clever horror gimmick.

There, of course, is the obligatory slasher killer episode where someone is murdering the party guests and its killer be killed. The two surviving party members end up stabbing the killer to death only to find out that it was their teacher who had been blackmailed into murdering them all horribly by the host who has the poor guy's family. And my personal favorite, the episode where the party guests are told they have to cut off their own fingers and toes

to fill a bowl attached to a skin, that'll trigger a door and release them. This one was really grim, because most of the people in this one were total assholes. And they ended up turning on this one poor kid they'd been teasing and bullying in the intro and forcibly removing his digits without cutting off any of their own. The denouement here was awesome.

They all rushed out the exit when it unlocked, leaving the poor fingerless kid bleeding on the floor in the party room. Only, the exit led straight down an elevator show. The sound effect as all five of them just plummeted into the darkness and splattered at the bottom was fucking great. I swear they must have thrown like a slab of ham down an actual lift shop or something to get that sound. So yeah, I know maybe it sounds a bit traditional saw-like horror, but any of you have heard of it? No, it's way better than that. I mean, first off, the actors are absolutely incredible.

Like, I've never heard a podcast actor. that believably. It's different actors each episode, too. You never get the same partygoers twice. The only person who recurs is the host. And they're just amazing. I don't know if they record in a studio or actually set up at the party location and just role play, but you'd swear it was the audio of an Oscar-worthy movie or something. It sort of makes me wish they'd live-stream it or do a visual version, actually. I think it'd go really well on YouTube or something. I guess it's just the budget that it'd require, doing in podcast form they don't need any special visual effects for the horrific kills or anything. Makes it seem more real when you can't see it, I guess.

Secondly, remember I mentioned metanarrative fourth while breaking, yeah? That part's really clever, and it leads to listener engagement in a way that I'm surprised more podcasts don't do. Presumably, the text's fairly easily accessible if final party does it, but I've never heard anything quite like it elsewhere. Basically, and I don't know how it does it, but the podcast draws on your iTunes or podcast feed user data to make custom recordings aimed at you. The host addresses you by name, as if he's narrating the podcast directly to you. It's fucking incredible.

The way he describes the scenes, the way he tells you what's going on, it's like he's actually there watching it all play out. It's very well written. I think my absolute favorite way the fourth wall was used was one time when I listened, to the show with my husband. We normally listen to it alone and then discuss it afterwards. It's creepier that way, but one night he was over and it was a new episode day and we were both super excited to listen. I have no idea how they did it, but the host addressed both of us. We totally flipped, proper screaming and then looking at each other and laughing. My husband was logged on to

some of his accounts on my laptop, so I guess it scraped his user data from somewhere, which I guess is probably a concern for security, but fuck, it's just too cool and creepy to worry about that too much, yeah? At the end of every show, you're issued with a custom invite to come party yourself. I love that touch, too. Like, I could have actually believed that these parties are for real going on somewhere, and I could actually go to one and get the pants scared off of me. Me and my husband talked about this a lot. There's even a community of fan pick writers who write about their own ideal final parties, and I admit, I got a bit involved in that. It was through this community that we found out the invitations weren't just for horror

effect. Like, holy shit, guys, if you don't know already, this is how they get the actors for the show. We actually get to attend the parties ourselves. I signed up via the link that one of the producers, or I can only assume because he was anonymous, posted on the community, and soon enough, both myself and my husband were issued with honest to God. postal invites. Proper fancy cardstock with black seals a lot. So, oh my God, the party is tonight, and I'm so fucking thrilled I could puke. I wonder what theme we'll get. Something really gory and

violent, I hope. I'm looking forward to being split from tits to toes, as the host has said before. Or no, maybe, maybe I'll be the survivor. I don't know. However it plays out, I am so, excited. I love these ARG things. I love the idea of live escape the room games, and I love this goddamn podcast. We don't know where the party's being held yet. We all have to meet at a location outside of town where a van will come and take us to the party proper. Excited to see who I'll be going with. Sometimes the groups are made out of existing friends. Sometimes they're all strangers. Faries. I don't really know much else about what to expect other than what the producer told me. I tried to get in touch with some of the past actors and partygoers,

but I guess they must have signed non-disclosure agreements or something because I can't track down any of the people I've heard on the podcast. The fandom's pretty obsessed with finding them, but so far we've come up empty. So yeah, the final party's tonight, and I've got my hottest horny teen horror movie dress ready. I'm so hyped, you guys. I really hope there are some other final party fans on here. Or if not, I really hope you can check out the show.

In fact, our episode should be going up next week, I think. So by this time next Sunday, you'll all be able to listen to me get murdered horribly. Or survive, I guess. I just hope that either way, I don't die first. I am really fucking excited. Yeah, that's quite a description of the show, Nicole. I know, right? But I'm really not sure it's such a great idea for you to go to the...

No time, David. I got to go get ready. I'll talk to you later. Bye, everyone. Yeah, bye. Goodbye indeed, Nicole. Well, we thank Nicole for sharing that with us, and thanks to Olivia White for telling Nicole and all of us about that podcast.

Strange, I went to the website, The Final. Dot Party, but can't find much more about it. Strange, indeed. I think it's best we all still, clear of that show. Anyway, let's carry on with our next tale. When a young and relatively healthy young woman suddenly finds herself fighting a life-threatening illness, she must endure an unthinkable ordeal.

In this tale from author Lauren Lutz, the woman is legally dead at one point, and what she discovers in that time will affect her entire existence. Performing this tale are Addison Peacock, Kyle Akers, and Erica Sanderson. So let's hear the woman explain what happened as she tells us about when I died. Not too long ago, I came across this theory called biocentrism. It's a theory in quantum physics developed by Robert Lanzah that posits that people don't actually die. The body itself experiences biological death, but the quantum material stored as consciousness in our neural tubules gets released back into the universe and continues to exist in one form or another. In other words, our minds continue to live after death.

That's a very dumped-down version of the theory, but scientists who support it claim this can explain astral projections, deja vu experiences, and visions of the afterlife. This might sound like nothing more than science fiction, but it's something that I hold on to, as it helps me cope with what I experienced when I died. I suppose I should explain myself, since I just made a pretty bold claim. And to answer your question, no, I'm not still dead. I wouldn't be talking to you if I was. I was resuscitated at 3.15 a.m. after 14 minutes of being legally dead.

When I came back to life, which is still a strange thing for me to say, and my mom told me what had happened, I didn't know what to think. I didn't feel like I had died. I felt like I had just woken up from a deep sleep. But how is one supposed to feel after cheating death? Now, to answer your second question, how did I die? Well, it started a week before it actually happened. I was at work and couldn't decide if I felt sick or not. I had a twinge in my stomach and I felt a general malaise.

My brain was slow and I was more tired than usual. My coworkers kept asking if I was okay. I told them I didn't know if I was just tired or if the bacon I had with my breakfast was undercooked or too greasy. I had been eating super clean. Vegetables, fruits, unprocessed meats, very little grease. I thought maybe my stomach was unsure how to handle all the bacon fat I had. I played it safe and decided to go home after three hours.

I felt guilty for leaving as my family instilled a strong sense of responsibility in me, and I felt like I was letting my coworkers down by not toughing it out. An hour after I had that thought, I started vomiting. At first, I thought it was kind of funny. I have no idea why I was amused by it as I was puking my guts out. Maybe because I thought it was such a violent reaction to a little grease. my body contracting so hard just to rid itself of any potential toxin. I joked that it counted as an ab workout since I obviously wouldn't be going to the gym that day.

But it quickly stopped being funny. I couldn't stop vomiting. Even room temperature water I carefully sipped wouldn't stay down. The ab workout quickly became unbearably painful. I was a pitiful lump on my bed. A trash bin was next to me so I wouldn't have to run to the bath. room. Still, I didn't think anything of it. Nothing more than potential food poisoning or your run-of-the-mill flu. I jokingly texted my friends that I wanted them to kill me. I stopped vomiting the next day, yet somehow felt worse. I was dehydrated and had no energy as I hadn't eaten

or drunk anything in over 24 hours. The worst part was that breathing hurt. Each inhale was difficult, like my ribcage was encased in steel. I felt lightheaded and dizzy and rested like a weight on my pillows. Mom came over to my apartment to check on me. She brought with her arsenal of flu-fighting weapons, Lysol, soup, pediolite, tissues, crackers, and a thermometer. She checked my fever, and despite feeling the sickest I ever had in my wife, my temperature only read 99.8. She shook her head. I never run a fever, and this was no exception. My mom was optimistic. She said my sweating meant the sickness was breaking, and I'd probably start feeling better the next day. For good measure, she plugged in a humidifier in hopes of helping my breathing. Surprisingly,

I did feel better the next day. I woke up the next morning feeling almost human again. My skin stopped hurting, and I was able to sit upright without feeling dizzy. Breathing was still an effort, but it was coming easier than the previous day. My boyfriend made me soup, which I was able to eat without it coming back up. I was feeling so good I thought I would be able to go to work the next day. However, sometime in the middle of the night, the chills woke me up. I was under two blankets and sleeping next to my boyfriend, the human furnace, but I was freezing. My inside started hurting, and the room felt like it was spruce.

spinning. I tried to draw in a breath, but I felt like my airway was lined with cotton. He wound up taking me to the emergency room around 5 a.m. We waited in triage until 9. When a doctor finally saw me, he chalked it up to a respiratory infection and sent us home with a prescription. We stopped at the grocery store so my boyfriend could get more Gatorade and pick up my meds. I waited in the car because remaining vertical position was difficult. He helped me back into bed. And I collapsed like a sack of bricks onto the mattress. Do you need me to stay home with you? He set a bottle of water beside my bed with the TV remote.

No, I'll probably just sleep until you come back. All right. Well, promise you'll text me if you need anything or start to feel worse. I promise. He hesitated on my bedside, obviously conflicted about whether or not he should go. Eventually, he kissed my forehead. and left. I fell into a hard asleep. Whenever I was conscious, I couldn't comprehend anything. My vision was blurry and I felt like I was trapped in a lava lamp. The world was globular, bulging and warbling through viscous fluid. I vaguely remember my boyfriend,

gently tapping my cheek, my mom helping me into her SUV, then bright, fluorescent lighting wishing past me above. I could smell the sterile scent of a hospital. When I finally came to, I was in a hospital room hooked up to an IV with a tube down my throat. I felt cool saline coursing through my body and oxygen entering my lungs. I felt like hell.

And if I wasn't so exhausted, I probably would have been scared. My mom was sitting in a band-aid-colored chair next to my bed. She looked like hell too Her makeup was rubbed away And eyeliner smeared She always rubbed her face When she was anxious

When she saw I was awake I could tell she was trying not to break I must have looked worse than she did How are you feeling I couldn't answer her because of the tube Down my throat She realized this and started to cry and apologize I wanted to tell her it was okay

There was nothing to apologize eyes for and that I was going to be all right. I was getting medical attention, and I could only get better from here. But the tube in my throat prevented me from comforting my mom. Just as well, I suppose. I barely believed that I was going to be okay myself. No use in lying. Some time after that, I died. I don't know how long after. I wasn't conscious very often. I remember flashes of white and blurred faces, pen, blackness. I felt myself exhale, and that was it. When I opened my eyes, the world was different.

It felt like vivid dream, but I had a keen sense that I wasn't asleep. Everything was white and bright. Shadows were diffused. It was like being. in one of those interrogation rooms in the movies where they drown you out with light to intimidate you. I was in the corner of my hospital room. I don't know how I got there. There were doctors circling my bed. They were moving so slowly, almost as if they weren't moving at all. I heard a high-pitched drone. It sounded distant, muted, almost like it was coming for miles away. The monitor next to my bed had

several flat lines running across the screen. This confirmed my suspicion that I was dead. I didn't feel anything, not scared, not shocked. It was a passive acceptance of fact. I took a step forward, expecting to move like my surroundings, but I wasn't affected by whatever was slowing everything else down. I approached the ring of doctors surrounding my bed. I peeked over a short nurse's shoulder and saw myself laying there,

limp and listless. My jaw was slack. Every muscle relaxed. There were dark circles around my eyes. My face looked gaunt. I looked like I had been sick for months rather than a couple of days. It was strange, seeing myself there. Morbid.

I turned away, as I couldn't stand to look at myself anymore. I headed for the door and slipped out into the hallway. everything was still. Nothing seemed real. It was like being in a moment of held breath. Again, everything was saturated with light. No shadows. No one was around.

No sounds. The loneliness was oppressive. I felt like a knife cutting through cold air. I was hyper aware of how my hair wasn't moving as I walked. how my feet made no sound. I couldn't hear my breath, but why would I be breathing? I patted down the hallway. I had no destination in mind.

I didn't even know what I was doing. I was just moving for the sake of moving. There wasn't anything else to do but walk. Something drew my attention as I walked by an open door on my left. I stopped and glanced inside, rooted in the middle of a glaringly bright room. was a black shadow and its attention was focused on me. It struck me to the core. It had no specific form, no real body, no real face, but I knew it was looking at me.

Its edges were hazy and black tendrils slithered from its base along the floor and up the walls like vines. Intensity prickled my skin. Its presence bore down on me like a compactor and I was too terrible. terrified to look away. The room it was standing and was growing dimmer and dimmer. The fluorescent lights above flickered. It looked like it was draining the light out of the room. The shadow didn't change in size, but it seemed to get bigger until its weight was looming over me. I could feel its desire for me. It wanted me. I had no idea what for and I didn't want to find out. I took a step back and it shot up in height. If I were alive, my heart would have jumped into my throat. It continued

to fill up the room. The blackness that spread from it was unreal, like it was more than just darkness and more like another entity itself. I heard or a hiss. Battlesnake tails lice with a rumbling alligator hiss. I wish it didn't notice me, but it felt like it had been waiting for me. I didn't wanted near me. I turned and ran. I heard it follow me, like a rush of wind through trees. The overhead light started to drain and dim as I fled down the hall. My back prickled an expectation of it catching me. That couldn't happen. I was terrified of what would happen. No imagination on earth was wild enough to devise what this thing could possibly do. I reached my room and hurled myself through the door. The doctors that surrounded my bed were still

there as if they didn't move at all. I was still laying on the bed, lifeless. I didn't want to be dead anymore. I didn't want to be trapped with that thing. What could I do? Could I lay back in my body and will myself back to life? I heard static and the feel of pressure on my ears. Black tendrils slipped under the door and rattled it in its hinges. There was a loud gust outside the door, like air rushing from a cave. It was trying to be. get me, grab me and take me back wherever it came from. I wanted to cry for my mom. I wanted to wake up. I was so scared. I tried shouting at the doctors to revive me, but no sound left my mouth. I ran to the side of the bed and gripped my shoulders. I tried shaking my body, willing it to wake up for the

love of God, wake up. The door flew open to a black void. The shadow figure crept in and loomed over the room. It swelled in size like a black swarm. It leaned forward. I shut my eyes and cried out. I jolted. A massive shock shot through my body. I heard beeping and someone shouting. We got a heartbeat. Voices swirled in a cacophony. Pandemonium. My eyes rolled open to the doctors still above me. I think I made brief eye contact with a nurse. I heard her say my name, but I lost consciousness again. The next time I woke up, I had no memory of what I had seen.

I felt groggy and disoriented. My mom was passed out in the same chair I last saw her in. Ivies were still stuck in my arm, and a tube was still shoved down my throat. I felt like hell, yet firmly alive. The steady beeping of the monitor tracking my vital signs made me jump. I saw a flash of black cross my memory, and an eerie feeling tipped down my spine. I had that same feeling you get when you know you had a dream.

It's on the edge of your memory, but... Can't recall any immediate details. It nagged at the back of my mind. When mom woke up, she started crying. Never wanted to keep her shit together. she sobbed the entire story to me. How sick I was, how I was actually dead for 14 minutes. She never prayed so hard in her life, she said.

Over the next few weeks, snippets of what I saw while dead, that's still weird to say, came back to me in vague images that didn't make sense. I thought they were just dream fragments. It wasn't until I was scheduled to have a meeting with my boss that it all came flooding back to me. We stepped into a small conference room and she flipped on the light. The room immediately filled with bright light

that washed out all of the shadows. My heart jumped to my throat and my stomach dropped. I half expected to see that shadow standing there waiting for me. I fell back against the wall, chest heaving as I struggled to breathe. I remembered it all, waking up in the hospital, acknowledging I was dead, then seeing that thing standing in the empty hospital room

not even bothering to hide. I was in its world, and it wanted to be seen. I ran out of the room and had a meltdown in the middle of the office. My boss kindly sent me home to recover. I left, but instead of going home, I drove around listening to music. The thought of being alone in my apartment scared me. I couldn't stop thinking about that shadow.

To be honest, I have no idea if what I saw was real. I don't know if it was my quantum material releasing into another dimension, or if it was my brain rapidly firing disturbing images as it fought for oxygen. I have no clue. It doesn't matter, because I carry it with me as if it were real. I'm scared of bright spaces. I expect to see a black figure audaciously waiting for me. I'm also terrified of dying now.

If what I saw was really what waits for us after death, then horror is inevitable. I don't want to die again. I don't want to see that. But I can't shake the feeling that just beyond the fragile veil of life, the shadow is waiting for me. And sometimes I think I can still feel it watching me. I have no doubt all of us are genuinely good and decent people. When faced with poverty and those in need, we try to help out where we can, right? But in this tale from author Henry Galley, we meet a woman who encounters a homeless man asking for a handout.

Unwilling to help, the woman finds herself dealing with a situation far costlier than a few coins. Performing this tale are Jessica McAvoy, Nicole Goodnight, and Atticus Jackson. So consider your decision carefully the next day. you're asked to spare some change. I stumbled out of a local bar late in the summer of 2008. Must have been around midnight. It was the worst kind of weather. Hot and damp, like the inside of your mouth.

And smelling about as sweet as mine tasted after the eighth beer. My blood alcohol level could probably have put a child under 10 into a coma. and you could see clearly in my gangling rag doll gate that I'd overdone it by a broad margin. I was wearing what was one of my nicest dresses before all of the night's activities. Now it was sporting a variety of strange and interesting stains, each one telling its own little story. Some funny, some sad. All worth hearing. Everyone else had left with someone, except me, possibly on account of the aforementioned stains.

I was fumbling around in the dark, trying to find some corner to get my bearings on, but all the streets were too wide and desolate. In my haze of cheap spirits and endorphins, it was even harder than usual to orient my internal compass, let alone take any direction from it. I'd just slumped out of a birthday party, my friend Michael's 21st. So naturally, we celebrated with grand excess, the hefty consequences of which were royally kicking my ass from there to Kansas. I drove up to the place earlier in the night, but after the party, I was so far above the legal driving limit, I'd need a telescope to see it, and I'd just drank the fare I'd need for a cab. The only option left was taking a little jaunt back home on foot, so that's exactly what I did.

That, in case you can't tell, was a bad idea. But, of course, I was young and too naive to know that the world wasn't safe for people like me. Streets like those in the dead of night might as well be human-sized bare traps, and you can dial that danger up to 11 when you're intoxicated. It was about to become the worst night of my life. Let me explain. Time, for the most part, is not unlike a train. Well, that's not entirely accurate. I guess a better way to say it is that memory is like a train.

All the events are lined up like the cars in sequence, connected but ultimately separate, all heading in the same direction towards some point of termination. When you're drunk, I mean really, truly blind drunk like I was back then. Memory is less like a train and more like a worm. The events are still in sequence, but there's no sense of sovereignty between them. They meld and blend and coalesce, heading in no particular direction but getting there pretty damn fast. And, most importantly, if there's a disconnect at any point, both sides are apt to grow a new

beginning and a new end. This all leaves you with two questions. What actually happened and which ends are real? Let's just hope I've grabbed this one at the right end. So I hobbled my way down fifth, forcing down a tide of boozy vomit climbing up the greased walls of my throat. Even in my highly diminished capacity for reason, I still knew the way home.

I'd made the journey so many times by then it was practically muscle memory, like turning on your body's innate sense of cruise control. Few long roads, few turns, and I'd be home free. Still, easier said than done when straight lines were a challenge to achieve. I was making my way down to Ashford Street when I first caught him in my peripheral vision, trudging towards me. He was little more than a shape at that stage, vaguely human, making his way. over in a sad, trailing limp that I found I recognized all too well. You got any change?

That's how it all started, with him and those words. Those goddamn words. My city had a homeless problem. Maybe it was the lack of jobs, the awful housing market, or people suffering from drug addiction and mental illness without the resources to treat them. Who knows? But regardless of the reason,

the result was always the same. A lot of innocent people left sleeping rough on nights that the human body wasn't built to endure. Those poor folks are spat on by fate and ground down by the heel of the elements. And of course, I had the utmost sympathy for them, for all of them.

However, that doesn't mean I'd always got what they wanted. I was no debutante myself. In fact, at any given time, I was only about a month's paycheck or so from pulling up a cardboard blanket next to them. The economy had shit the bed earlier in the year, and nobody who isn't crazy rich or on rock bottom felt secure in their position in the world. Still, the guy limping towards me was in real. bad shape, sunken bloodshot peepers, hollow cheeks, and a wiry death-camp physique that seemed

to scream starvation. The grime blended so deep into his ashy complexion that he looked more filth than man, and had been for quite some time. I couldn't even begin to guess the poor bastard's age. In his dirty mishmash of old hoodies, sweatpants and tattered scarves, he barely looked recognizably human. I was too wasted to hold a conversation, and I'd blown my last few dollars on shots. For all intents and purposes, we've got nothing to say to each other, but he kept walking towards me. Lady, please, I'm cold.

Just a dollar. That's all I'm asking you for. I tried to tell him that I had no money, but it came out as a strange. of incoherent gibberish. He thought I was mocking him. I could see it in those tired, sullen eyes of his, eyes that carried the weight of a world and a history darker than anything I'd ever known. He stepped a little closer, a ragged hand extended. The fingers looked gnarled and arthritic, like the thinnest branches of a dying tree in the darkest hour of winter. Every part of that man suggested some kind of pain, some kind of misery.

It was almost as though he somehow embodied the feeling of discomfort on an atomic level. The tramp just exuded hurt. I'm not trying to hassle you here, ma'am. That's not like I'm asking for your bank account numbers. I just want some change. Can't you spare any change? Through the foggy prism of intoxication, everything looked either better or worse, depending on what it was to you originally. When you're looking for someone to spend the night with, it takes everyone's attractiveness up a couple of notches,

and it makes some fairly good friends feel like people you'd take a bullet for without a moment's hesitation. Conversely, though, being mildly harangued by a sickly emaciated, homeless man, when filtered through that prism of intoxication, becomes a complete and utter nightmare. I'm ashamed to admit it, but the closer he got to me, the closer I got to freaking out. And if there's one immutable truth about humanity, it's that everyone has a breaking point. In the state I was in, it didn't take the poor guy long to find mine. Look, ma'am. That was when it got too much for me.

Surprising even myself, I barged my shoulder into his chest, while screaming some drunken approximation of, Get the hell off of me. It knocked the breath from his body. You could hear it in a single, wheezy rattle that left the poor bastard winded. He collapsed back onto the side of the side of it. walk with a sickeningly dull thud. And before I could even check if he was okay, my legs were dragging me at full tilt in the other direction. I could hear his groaning fade into the general

background noise of the city as I sped away from the awful thing I'd just done. He got a little handsy, sure, but I still didn't see touching someone's shoulder as grounds for assault. That was my damage, not his. Still, I consoled myself with the fact I probably wouldn't remember any of this in the morning. It all be a clouded, unclear mess, no different from a dream and just as easily dismissed. It was easy in these moments.

To understand how people can get up to some truly awful shit when they're drunk. All sense of responsibility and consequence is just dulled insulated, made impotent as it flails in the sea of booze. By the time I reached the junction at the end of fifth, the memory of the tramp had already started fading. Everything secondary to the main priority, which is to say, getting home in one piece, took a psychological backseat. Compartmentalization may not be healthy long term, but it got the job done in a pinch. The streets, for the most part, were vacant.

Curtains drawn, shutter closed, windows locked. Late night lends itself to emptiness. The streets pour into their houses for the evening, and anyone left outside is thrown into the freak basket almost by default. Those were the kind of people out there at that time of night, drunkard and weirdos, and I was lucky to be among the people. the inebriated. But that also meant I wasn't alone. Suddenly, I could hear footsteps, not behind me, but in front of me, but I couldn't see who was making them. Not yet. Then it was

breathing, low and hoarse, like breath from broken lungs, breathing and footsteps coming my way. Wasted as I was, I knew how to avoid trouble. There were some working street lamps on the other side of the road, so after a quick check to make sure I was clear of any oncoming traffic, I crossed the street into the salvation of that murky off-yellow light. The side I'd just vacated was framed by tall, immaculate hedges that made it even easier to stab the living hell out of someone without being seen. From the relative safety of the other side, still forging forwards to the sweet prize of home,

and the inevitable killer hangover that set in the next morning, I got a better look at the source of the footsteps and the breathing. As expected, it was just some guy, limping his way along the sidewalk, minding his own business. He'd got his good things, and I'd got mine. It was only after I passed him that I stopped for a second to double-take and think about what I'd just seen. The man across the street, wheezing and limping, there had been a certain familiarity to the way he held himself. The filthy scarves wrapped around the neck of that worn, gray hoodie set off alarm bells in some part of me too deep and too primal to be a feeling. affected by all the beer and the tequila.

That man, I could have sworn I'd seen him before. Could it have been... No, surely not. I put my head down and carried on walking. Just a few more blocks to my street than it all be over. Just my mind playing stupid, stupid tricks on me. I'd been drinking more and more back then. Sometimes to have fun, sometimes just to get drunk and tune out of thinking life for a little while.

Nothing had been making sense since the crash. A lot of my family's savings and my parents' pensions went septic when everything blew up. Mom and Dad, they were meant to be the adults, the stable ones. If their finances could go down the tube after years of stability, after years of playing by the rules and doing everything they were supposed to. What hope did I have? What hope did any of us have? To me, that was scarier than any tricks my booze-addled brain could play. Besides, I had always had a crappy imagination. It was only when I was 200 feet or so from home that the noises started again. The bump and drag of limping boots, the hiss of air escaping

past rotten teeth and scabby lips, and a faint, dry crackle I'd not heard before. Not on that night, anyway. It was far closer than before, terribly, awfully close. Got changed. It was different somehow, worse. It was crackly, strangled, deep. But without a doubt it was still him, still the homeless man from back there. But he'd changed, altered. I sure as hell didn't want to know how. Before those grubby fingers could touch me again, I started sprinting without looking back. Forward, forward, forward, forward. That was all that mattered. He'd followed me. He'd stalked me. Harmless people would. With good intentions, don't do that.

A few minutes of solid running later, I finally had the mix of confidence and morbid curiosity necessary to steal a glance behind me. Sure enough, there he was. The same rail-thin hobo in his filthy hoodie festooned in threadbare scarves. He dipped in and out of the tepid lamplight, swaying by. backwards and forwards with each limping stride. I sprinted as fast as my body would allow, but somehow he was still closing the distance and closing it fast.

He'd changed all right, but not for the better. The clothes and the build were the same, but his skin had lost that unhealthy waxen sheen, which had been traded for skin black as pitch. Still, somehow, I could see him clearly as though he was his own light source. I didn't want to stick around to consider why. Fear had sobered me up a smidgen, and if there was anything I feared, it was that man, if he could even be considered a man anymore.

He was no more than 20 feet from me, leaping, bounding, loping. He'd be on top of me in no time at all if I didn't get out of there. And you better believe I did. The sprint I broke into with that monstrous bastard on my heels was something I wouldn't have known I was capable of before. It was a mad, frantic, anaerobic dash that made my lungs sear and my muscles pump magma. Even then, he was gaining on me,

all thumps and wheezes. and terrible crackling like broken bones. Home, for the first time that night, was finally in reach, but I couldn't run there. I couldn't afford to let this thing know where I lived. I had to lose him first. Without checking to see how close the bastard had gotten, I turned a tight corner and ran into a nearby park,

almost losing my balance on the moist grass underfoot. riding myself, I continued to run as fast as I was able, hearing the strange clump and hiss of the tramp's footsteps on the grass behind me. Change! I was too drunk to respond earlier, too scared to respond then. No matter how fast I ran, the tramp didn't seem to tire. His wheezing never slowed or quickened. The terrible crackling only grew more deafening. His body emanated heat, like he was radioactive.

The closer he got, the more you could feel the burn. It started off as a low tingling. Then it felt like a bad sunburn. And eventually, it felt like any minute the flesh of your exposed back and shoulders was going to start bubbling. One thing I knew for sure, I couldn't let him touch me. If the tramp touched me, I'd die on the spot. We continued what felt like a grand act in futility for a few more minutes when I realized that in a straightforward game of runner and chaser,

I was always destined to lose. But if I could outsmart it, I might have been in for a chance at survival. My chances were slim, but crazier things have happened. Wait, I take that back. I don't know if anything crazier than this has ever happened. My destination was a network of trees on the edge of the park. I darted through, dodging and merging, running at nonsensical angles and hiding when I could. Again, I never turned to look at the tramp.

Why would I? If I ever got close enough to see his, no, its eyes, I was already dead. All I could do was try to outfox it. And if I couldn't do that, then all I was was its prey. Throughout this whole process, my heart was beating fast enough to break ribs and snap sternums. I could feel it throbbing in every inch of me, but I had to keep running. The tramp's footsteps and weezes and monstrous crackling died down, little by little, until I was slumped behind a mighty oak tree with a broken body and an addled mind.

But I was alive, very much alive. And the tramp, he was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for me. Life, strange and shitty as it can be, was good enough for me. Must have been another hour before I could get up again. And when I did, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. Every fiber of my being ached and burned and throbbed. But to feel anything right then felt like a gift.

Once I had finally caught my breath and made my way out from a moment. the trees, stealing pensive glances all around me for the tramp. Fear put him everywhere, behind every tree, under every stone, creeping up behind me. But he was nowhere, nowhere I could see. I ran back to my front door, ready to collapse the second my adrenaline reserves ran dry, and the needle was getting pretty damn close to empty. The streets sat long and silent as ever. So strange, considering what just transpired.

It always amazed me how indifferent the world at large was to my funny little problems. Even if I died, if the tramp caught me and did whatever the hell it was he wanted to do, the world would give a soft little exhale and carry on. Not sure if that's comforting or terrifying, or a little of both. After double and triple locking the front door behind me, I finally felt a little safer. That being said, I did still move a heavy wooden cabinet in front of the door. Just to be safe. Could I be blamed for being cautious?

I may have lost the tramp, but he was still unlawful. Out there somewhere. I decided it was better to get a good night's sleep and fully sober up before I called to the police and reported the crazy ordeal I'd just been through. A good night's sleep. That'd make it all better. I think some part of me must have genuinely believed that. People might think it'd be impossible to sleep after seeing the things I'd seen,

but my exhaustion was greater than my terror. Nightmares are for people with enough energy to conjure them, and back then I wasn't equipped for that. Sheathed in a blanket and a duvet, after the craziest night of my life, I was ready to finally drift off to a gentle state of slumber, a reprieve from the insanity. That felt like something I'd earned. What could have been anything between minutes and hours later? I was jarred from my sleep by noises downstairs. At first, just rustling, then wheezing, then crackling, and my heart seemed to seize up in my chest. It was him, the tramp.

He was there. You must understand. It wasn't fear that set in, just this profound sense of crushing futility. I could have gotten up out of bed and run again, sure. I could run to the ends of the earth, but he'd still catch me. I could hide, but he'd still find me. I could fight, but he'd always beat me. All I could really do was lay in bed and wait.

my fate, and my fate was already limping its way up the stairs. The hallway lit up. It was a warm, orange glow creeping down towards my open bedroom door. The crackle had become a roar, spitting embers, scorching carpet and furniture. Something out there was burning, but I couldn't quite tell what. Before I could even see what was going on, I was already breaking out into a cold sweat, leaving me clammy as a goddamn toad. I was going to die, and I was going to die looking like a fool. He spoke from around the corner, inches away from the doorframe. It was no longer a truncated little grunt. It was a long, protracted hiss, like a shovel striking a fireplace full of hot coals. Plumes of orange flame crested and licked around the doorframe as the thick, offensive stench

of burning meat came wafting into my bedroom in full force. The tramp was a flame, burning, a walking inferno. It was coming from inside him, the fire. Spilling out from the sizable cracks and canyons on his charred excuse for skin. No eyes, just smoldering pits of molten jelly that dripped liberally down his cheeks. His scarfs and dirty old hoodie were up in smoke. Too drunk for words earlier. Too scared before. Too bewildered then.

The burning tramp was a present. that seemed to devour the room, trapping me in my bed. It was bright, so damn bright. So I held up my shaking arms to shield my eyes as he stepped a little closer. He said again, less a growl and more a hoarse whisper. There was a sickening intimacy to it. He reached forward with a burning hand and grabbed mine, locking his finger, around my skin in an iron-clad death grip.

The pain was so forceful and immediate. I thought I was dying right there. My jaws parted in a soundless screech as the fire spread up my forearm, biting me, eating me. Flesh prickled, then blackened, then charred. And he never stopped staring at me with those melting eyes in that burning skull.

of a face. It was then that I fast forward to the back of an ambulance, where a cocktail of painkillers woke me up from whatever comatose state the tramp's grasp had put me in. I was lucky enough to have still been asleep when they pumped my stomach. Apparently, I was twice over the threshold for safe alcohol consumption. My night of binging had apparently left me on the precipice of alcohol poisoning. She's awake. We've got to breathe her. Oh, thank God.

They performed some basic tests. Check my vision, pupil dilation, response time, just wanting to make sure I did not lost too many brain cells from oxygen deprivation while I was out. Thankfully, I didn't seem any stupider than before, though the doctors phrased it more politely than that. What happened? I managed to wheeze out, my lungs strapped from smoke inhalation.

The paramedics told me, in no uncertain terms, that they'd dragged me from the burning wreckage of my home. The point of origin seemed to be my bedroom, but the cause was unclear. Lucky to be alive was a statement I became intimately familiar with over those days, and I certainly felt lucky. until the nurses peeled all the bandages and gauze off of what remained of my arm. When a matchstick burns too long, it becomes a gnarled, twisted length of hardened ash. That's what my arm looked like. The burns weren't skin deep.

They weren't flesh deep. They were bone deep, like the business end of a half-smoked cigarette. and like the end of a smoked cigarette, it was clear to everyone soon enough that it needed to be removed. At the elbow, as it turns out. The tramp had really done a number on me. Of course, to them, it wasn't the tramp. It was some electric short, a blown fuse, palti wiring.

Though none of them could explain why the burning was localized to such a specific region of my body. Not that they ever really asked me. I was drunk at the time, after all, and that made me an unreliable witness to my own life. My stay in the hospital lasted about two months, recovering from the burns, the smoke inhalation, the alcohol poisoning, and the subsequent amputation.

I got some psychological counseling in there, too, for my trouble. But more important than that, I had plenty of time on my hands. Well, hand. While the doctors didn't believe the story of the tramp for a second, I knew something like that was too strange, too specific to be made up. He wasn't the stuff of dreams, not even the stuff of nightmares. He was tangible.

He was real. and I became obsessed with proving that fact, if only to myself. That's when I found out about George Cook. He was a happy guy once, had a wife, two kids, and a decent job as an assistant manager at the local Safeway. One week, his idyllic, white picket fence life got turned upside down, when he and his co-workers went on a three-day trip. to practice team-building exercises. You know, trust balls, paintball, all inane corporate fluff. But while George was away, his wife and children succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in the night.

That George insisted he'd get a repairman to take a look at any day now. I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like for him. predictably, George's life fell apart. Spiraling into depression and alcoholism, he lost his job, and soon after that, he lost his house. He was sleeping rough for a whole year before the incident eventually happened. It was near the bar where we'd all been celebrating Mikey's 21st, ignorant to what had happened just a few feet away. George was sequestered in some little nook nearby, wrapped in his hoodie and a throng of scarves to fight off the cold,

when a gang of drunken teens waltzed over to him. Poor old George made the mistake of asking them for change and got seven shades of shit kicked out of him for his trouble. For reasons unclear to all, they left him alone after that, broken and bleeding. Well, for a few hours. anyway. It was late into the night when they came back, armed with a can of lighter fluid and a book of matches, and sent poor George to the grave in his sleep. A local tabloid went with the tasteful

headline, Cook Cooked, telling the story of the family man turned homeless man, turned human inferno. Others were a little more tasteful, but not by much. All they gave a crap about it, was the spectacle of the crime, not the human cost. There was a picture of Cook in the online edition of the article, taken back during a family birthday party. His eyes were a little less sunken, his face a little less gaunt, and his mouth curved into an unfamiliar smile.

But other than that, it was unquestionably the same guy, the same creature that followed me that night, and forever altered my life. The doctors and the police don't need to believe me. I know what's true. And so, another episode has drawn to a close, and our nightmares dissolve into the ether. If you would like to find out how you can hear

the full-length versions of our audio program, please visit the no-sleeppodcast.com to learn about our season past 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 dark tales will envelop you in a nightmarish, swirling fog. This audio production is copyright 2017 by Creative Reason Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. No duplication or reproduction of this audio program is permitted without the written consent of Creative Reason Media, Inc.