The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S9E09

Episode Date: July 2, 2017

It's episode 09 of Season 9. On this week's show we have five tales about confined kids, striking storms, and freaky forests. "The Secrets Inside Dune"† written by Jared Roberts and performed by Matthew Bradford & Erin Lillis. (Story starts around 00:03:30) "I Bought The House I Died in as a Child"‡ written by Olivia White and performed by James Cleveland & Erika Sanderson & Andy Cresswell. (Story starts around 00:17:30) "An Unwelcome Audience"† written by Steven Schrembeck and performed by Peter Lewis & Jessica McEvoy & Jesse Cornett & Dan Zappulla. (Story starts around 00:43:25) "It Came With The Storm"‡ written by Christine Druga & Seamus Coffey & Ash Ellinwood & E.K. Skinner & Lindsay Moore & Michael Marks and performed by Dan Zappulla & Erin Lillis & Wafiyyah White. (Story starts around 01:15:20) "When It Rains in the Woods"† written by T. Weaver and performed by Jesse Cornett & Jessica McEvoy. (Story starts around 01:45:00) Click here to learn more about the voice actors on The NoSleep Podcast   Click here to learn more about Erin Lillis   Click here to learn more about Wafiyyah White   Click here to learn more about Jared Roberts   Click here to learn more about Olivia White   Click here to learn more about Steven Schrembeck   Click here to learn more about Christine Druga   Click here to learn more about Seamus Coffey   Click here to learn more about Ash Ellinwood   Click here to learn more about E.K. Skinner   Click here to learn more about Lindsay Moore   Click here to learn more about Michael Marks   Executive Producer & Host: David Cummings Musical score composed by: Brandon Boone Audio adaptations produced by: Phil Michalski† & Jeff Clement‡ "When It Rains in the Woods" illustration courtesy of Lukasz Godlewski 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 Conferex. Find Kids, Striking Storms, and Freaky Forests. It's my pleasure to welcome two new voice actors to the show. Wafia White is a trained actor with a BA in drama from the University of North Carolina. She has a number of stage and film credits and is branching out into voice acting. We're glad you're sharing your voice with us, Wafia. Also joining us is Aaron Lillis. Aaron is a writer, voice actor, podcaster,

and artist with a BFA and film from Emerson College. She's an experienced voice actor with numerous audiobooks, narrations, and commercial roles to her credit. Thank you for being a part of our team, Erin. We welcome both of these talented women to the show. Check the show notes to learn more about them. Longtime listeners may be familiar with some of our regular authors. We have the pleasure of collaborating with some of the best writers on the No Sleep subreddit. And it's a Occasionally, the No Sleep Writing Community holds a competition called No Sleep Teams, where authors are putting groups and each group creates a single story. We're pleased to be doing one such No Sleep Team story on this episode,

and I think you'll recognize most of the authors in that team. It's always good to see such fine talent collaborate. And before we begin, I want to wish our Canadian and American listeners is both a happy Canada Day and happy Independence Day. Canada turns 150 years old this weekend, so we're pretty flippin' stoked about that, eh? And of course, a happy red, white and blue 4th of July to our neighbors to the south.

May all the fireworks, hot dogs, and maple syrup-flavored poutine, in which we Canadians indulge, be enjoyed in abundance and safety this week. So this episode is really about people teaming up, collaborating, and uniting in the spirit of writing, acting, and patriotism. Let's raise the No Sleep podcast flag, salute, and start this week's show. In our first tale, we meet a young man who just can't figure out his parents. As explained by author Jared Roberts, his folks seem to be treating him differently lately. Perhaps their obsession with an old David Lynch film has something to do with it.

Performing this tale are Matthew Bradford and Aaron Lillis. So enjoy sci-fi epics all you want. Just make sure you're fully aware of the secrets inside Dune. This happened a long time ago. I've been thinking of it a lot lately because I've been going through my old stuff and I found something I never wanted to see again. This definitely feels like something I appropriate for here. When I was a teenager, I started noticing my parents behaving kind of strange.

Like they were different around me, not let's treat our son like an adult different, or he's a grouchy teen, let's ignore him different. It was almost like they were afraid of me, wanted to keep a distance. They were nicer in a way, because they wouldn't ask me to do chores or anything. but not as nice because they wouldn't ask me to come watch movies with them, go places with them, and that sort of thing. I never thought I'd miss those things. One of the strangest moments early on, I walked in on Dad sobbing.

He'd been drinking a lot, that much I could tell. I came up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He leaned away from me and spoke in a whisper. She just needs to know Bobby is okay. That made my skin crawl, because the thing is, I'm Bobby. I said I'm fine, nothing to worry about. Where'd you come from? He was still leaning away.

He looked into my eyes like I was some mutant that just appeared in his den. I told myself he was just really drunk and went to my room. Now, I was a pretty average teen. When I hit puberty, I filled out good. I liked playing sports, hockey in particular. I had some girls, nothing serious, had a good number of friends, and I enjoyed parties. I was a C student for the most part. I did a little better in English lit because my parents were both big into reading.

I was easy to get along with. I didn't have all the angst the less popular or more popular teens had. I was comfortable in the middle. I'm sure I could be a handful to my parents sometimes. I didn't think I was a bad kid. The way they were treating me, though, had me thinking I'd messed up. I was thinking, did I scratch Dad's car by accident? Did I say something shitty?

I knew I'd missed my chores a few times and Mom just did them herself. So I started making sure all my regular chores were done right when they should be. They thanked me like I'd just installed their satellite television, and then went back to what they were doing. So, after a while of this, I decided to ask. Hey, did I do something wrong? They looked at each other, looked back at me, and shook their heads. You're doing great, son.

Which was really, really weird. My dad never called me son before all this. After that, I started sitting with them in the evening when I had the time. just spending quality time together. I thought, if this is reverse psychology, it's working. Dad squirmed a little when I sat next to him. I'd never seen dad squirm in my life. Do I stink or something?

No, you're zestfully clean. He wore an uncomfortable smile. Sitting with them every so often, I noticed something. They only ever watched one movie anymore. It was all Dune, the 1980s movie with Kyle McLaughlin, where he's this royal kid who goes to a desert planet and rides sandworms. I'd seen it when I was a kid. It was okay. I didn't think it was good enough to watch over and over, but every time I sat with them, that's what they had on. You guys sure like Dune lately. My mom gave an odd reason. We bought the VHS.

Might as well get our money's worth. One night, I told them I was heading out with some friends. Then, I snuck back into my room through the window. I know. Most teens do the opposite, right? So I sneak back in and just lay back on my bed listening. I can hear them watching Dune again. They're at the part where he's training the desert people to fight with their voices,

and I hear them talking. Not like they're talking to each other, but to someone else. So I sneak out to the living room and look in. Mom and dad are up close to the TV screen. There's no one else in the room. Then they start talking again. They're talking to the movie. No, no, no, we're okay.

We love you and we miss you. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What was going on? It was like my family had been replaced by aliens. It didn't make any sense. Then Dad really started to scare me. What? No, no, he left.

We saw him leave. Who are they talking to? They both turned around and saw me watching them. I'm sure it was less than a second, but the looks on their faces was just pure, stunned terror. Take it out of here. I thought she meant me, but she said, It and not him.

Dad turned off the movie and ejected the tape. He put it in the sleeve and went into the basement with it. Mom looked nervous the whole time he was doing this. What's going on? A surprise. So what happened to make you come home so soon? I didn't feel well. So I went back upstairs.

She bought my lie. Dad came back into the room. Sorry, son. We were just embarrassed. You know, because of your comment about us watching Dune. It's a good movie. You learn more about it every time you see it. Just think about it, how these people are thrown into the desert planet and lose everything. But there's a secret inside. Do you know about the secret inside? Of course. The way he said it was very unnerving. I wasn't

about to argue. I went up to my room. I heard them whispering as I left. I didn't want to know what they were saying. While I moped in my room, I decided to look on the internet for Dune making people behave strange. Like, remember that movie in the mouth of madness? Where that guy's writings make people crazy? I couldn't find anything, mostly just complaints about David Lynch going commercial. So I went on IMDB and put on the Dune forum, parents acting strange, or something in the subject, and I asked if anyone else had noticed someone talking to the movie, or watching it over and over and over. I got a reply almost right away.

The guy sent it as a private message. He told me he doesn't know anything more than I do. Only knows is his son got obsessed with the movie before he committed suicide. He watched it over and over, drew scenes from the movie, said things like Kyle's Desert Trek and Strange Powers have captured me. He thought it was a phase. It was something else. He knows that now.

He said his son left the suicide no, if you can call it that. Brought to this planet of worms only betrayed and desecrated, but I've tasted the spice and see things I shouldn't see. But I've tasted the spice and see the secrets that are inside. You can't imagine. Dune is me. I gave the man my condolences and thanked him for sharing with me. I didn't feel any further ahead, just a little more serious.

scared. The suicide note obviously overlaps with what my dad said to me. It just confirmed that Dune seems to mess with some people's heads. It's just we'd watched Dune before, rented it from club videotech. It wasn't a big deal. I knew that I had to get rid of that damn tape, though. If it could make some boy kill himself, maybe he could do that to my parents. So that night, I pretended to be asleep for a while. I know that sounds silly. Like, were my parents really watching me that close? It was just a gut feeling, and it paid off.

After about an hour, when I'd figured the coast was clear, a shadow under the door frame that I figured was just an obstruction, moved away with a shuffle. That shuffle was my mom's slippers. She'd been standing there at my door for an hour. I waited another 30 minutes before sneaking out of my room. I moved quietly because I wasn't sure how asleep they were. They were so cagey lately.

I was freaking thorough. To let you know how much this was getting to me, I grabbed the WD 40 from under the sink and grease the basement door hinges because I knew they normally squeak. Yep, I snuck down and started hunting at any hiding place I could think of. The lights flipped on, and mom and dad both came rushing down, shouting. Get away from here, you miserable, monster! What the hell is the matter with you two?

That movie is driving you crazy. You know some kid committed suicide because of that movie? I don't know if those were my exact words, but I basically spewed this stuff out I'd been bottling up. Isn't it enough you took our Bobby away from us once? You have to do it again? What? You disgusting thing, living and breathing in our house for all these weeks. And you have the gall to look like our son.

What do you want from us? How much more can we take? Is this a joke? I'm your son. They looked at me and I saw the revulsion in their eyes. Now it made some awful sense. They really believed I wasn't their son. All this time, that's what it was.

We knew the very day it happened that you were something different. You sound, smell, look the same, but we loved Bobby. We know, we know. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to prove to them the obvious fact that I was the same person. They already acknowledged that I was exactly the same. I started crying. More with frustration than heard, I think.

I happened to look up and saw the copy of Dune resting on the ceiling rafters. I grabbed it and I was just about to smash it. That's when they started wailing, not crying, just like loud sounds coming out of their mouths. It was like a car alarm. I stopped right away. Please, please, please, don't. That's our boy in there. Bobby went into Dune when you took him away from us.

Show some mercy, whatever you are. I took the tape. I didn't smash it. I just took it, packed my bags, and left. Never went back home. I put that tape away somewhere. Tried never to think of it. I lost track of my parents over the years. I've tried to find them on a few occasions. They never reached out to me. I have not been hiding. Almost 20 years. Last week, I went looking for something. my stuff, and I found that damn tape. I couldn't bring myself to destroy it still. Instead, I decided to watch it. I thought it might do me good. I thought. I got to the scene where Lido dies. I swear I heard someone whisper. I rewound and played the part a few times,

but it never happened again. I put the tape away. Maybe, in another 20 years, I'll try again. We all know how children are prone to do some very foolhardy things, things which can do irreparable harm. Just ask author Olivia White. She shares the tale of a man who suffered a traumatic event in his childhood, but made a full recovery with no lingering effects, or so he thought. Performing this tale are James Cleveland, Erica Sanderson, and Andy Cresswell. So don't let the man confuse. you when he tells us, I bought the house I died in as a child.

I was six when I died. I lived in an old detached house in Surrey, Southwick House it was called. It was a Victorian property. My parents bought it from a very old couple who hadn't lived in it for decades. And as such, it had a lot of old furniture that kept that had been present in the house since it had been built. My dad was a leading heart surgeon based out of London, so my parents were pretty wealthy, and our house reflected that. It wasn't a mansion or anything.

It was modest compared to other properties in the county, but it was a very nice house. Big gardens, a fountain out back that rose out of an obsidian pond in which my mum kept a few coy. I'd stand there for hours as a kid, just staring into the black mirrored surface. looking for golden glimpses of those marvellous fish. I'd explore the rest of the garden too, endlessly creeping through the flower beds, playing in the woods that boarded the property, summers filled with scraped knees and dirty clothes,

myself and my friends building forts and exploring our own little world. It wasn't the grounds or the pond that killed me, but it was my inquisitiveness. Much like many old English properties, of its type, Southwick House had two main living floors and an attic. Unlike many English properties, it also had a cellar. Dad used to store wine at the start of the cellar, which was made up of a few roughly hewn rooms that smelled of earth and roots. Beyond his wine rack,

however, the cellar was basically unused, except for storing the kind of detritus that a family acquires and never has any need for, but doesn't want to dispose of. of anyway. I was alone the day I decided to explore the cellar. It was one of Dad's rare days off, and he and my mum were out in the garden, sunning themselves and reading. I came inside to escape the heat, and soon the typical six-year-old boy boredom kicked in. So I decided to explore the cellar. It wasn't that I was scared of the cellar or anything. I just didn't like the smell, and I'd kept away from going down there knowing that the contents were largely boring, and I'd be met with little more than empty rooms. I don't know what possessed me to change my

mind that day, but change my mind I did. As I'd expected, there was really nothing of interest in the cellar. Even my family's old possessions were just broken bits of furniture and clothes that my older sister had grown out of and mum hadn't yet donated Woxfam. I was about to leave the cellar and return to my room and my toys when something on the wall caught my eye. It was a square metal door. Too high for me to reach, but to my good fortune, a broken chair was nearby, so I dragged it across to this mysterious hatch, climbed up and opened it to see what treasures awaited inside. As you imagine. It was nothing exciting. It was, in fact, a fuse box, a very old, very poorly maintained fuse box, a fuse box that I, a curious child, began to meddle with. I don't know what I did

exactly, what wire I touched or connection I shorted to cause the jolt of electricity to flow through my body. All I can remember is suddenly feeling a white, hot, tingling pain, unlike anything I'd ever felt before. I felt my body being thrust backwards, as if an unseen force had shoved me hard. I felt my spine hit the uneven concrete floor and the breath shoot out of me. Then I felt something I can only describe as a burning hand gripping my heart. That's when I blacked out. I died. I was clinically dead for 20 minutes. The electrocution shorted out my heart and I lay there, actually dead, for a few minutes before my dad even found me. He could never explain why he came searching for me that day. All he ever told me was that he knew he had to check on me. And if he

hadn't, I don't think I'd be alive today. My dad, the heart surgery. began attempts to revive me while my mum called the paramedics. After another 15 minutes, which I'm sure must have felt like an eternity to my dad, the paramedics were able to successfully restart my heart. I woke up in hospital, painful burns covering a large portion of my body. My first thought was fear that I'd get in trouble for touching the thing in the cellar. And I was scolded, of course. but gently, and alongside gradual explanation of what happened to me.

At six years old, I don't think I fully grasped the severity of it, but two things I did understand. One, I was lucky to be alive. And two, I had died and come back. It was a miracle. I died for 20 minutes. And frankly, that made me feel a little bit of a bad. I'd like to say I had some kind of experience during the 20 minutes I died, but the truth is I didn't.

Or if I did, I don't remember it. No light at the end of the tunnel, no out-of-body experience. One minute I was dying and the next minute I was alive again. In time, the whole event became something I told friends as a point of interest. The burns healed, and other than having... regular heart monitoring, life went back to normal. When I was 12, Dad got a job working at a private hospital in the South West and we moved. It was 22 years until I thought about that house again. It was a month after I'd turned 34. I'd followed my father into medicine and become a GP in Reading,

near where I'd grown up as a child. I alternated between running NHS and private clinics. On the day question, I'd work particularly late at my NHS practice. When I got home, my girlfriend was waiting with a glass of wine and that look on her face that let me know she had something interesting to tell me. She was practically bursting to speak before I'd even taken my jacket off and loosened my tie. I got the weirdest call today. I kissed her on the cheek and took her proffered glass of wine. Oh yeah? Yeah, some guy in Sussex. Said his family lives in your old house. else? I frowned. What? Selfwick? Madeline nodded. I could see she had more to tell. What did he want? He's been trying to track you down, apparently. I was trying to get hold of your parents and obviously

eventually found you. Both of my parents had died when I was in my 20s. They were old when they had me. Mum died of cancer, dad, ironically, of a heart attack. My sister had long seen. My sister had long since emigrated to Canada, so it made sense that this guy had found me as the next port of call. But why? I asked Madeline as much. Okay, so this is the interesting part. He wanted to know if anything weird happened to you when you lived at Southwark. Anything supernatural? My eyes widened. It most certainly had not, but my interest was piqued. I was a horror aficionado and a firm atheist, but I guess working as a GP particularly, I'd often said that I'd love to be proven wrong about the existence of an afterlife. Of course, I expected nothing of the

sort from this guy, but I was intrigued nonetheless. I called the number Madeline had taken down. When Giles Robertson answered, his voice gave me pause. The man sounded exhausted, scared even. When I told him who I was, he let out an audible sigh of relief. Do you ever have any untoward experiences in that house? I told him that I hadn't. Nothing even remotely supernatural in feel had happened during my 12 years there. When I finished, Giles Robertson sounded disappointed. May I ask why?

It was an unusual, candid thing for a stranger to say, especially a man who sounded rather well to do. I assured him that as a doctor, I knew the benefits of listening to and believing people. My wife and I, we'd never seen anything, never heard anything. But we have two kids, he's eight. About a month after we moved in, they started a talk boy who'd come into their room

and, well, at first he'd play with them. We thought it was an imaginary friend. Siblings can sometimes share imaginary friends. It's not unusual. Indeed. I mean, I thought the name The Burning Boy was unusual, but hey, kids have interesting imaginations. So for months, everything was fine. We listened to their stories of the boy with polite smiles and nods, but lately things have escalated. My children keep sleepwalking. We find them in the cellar standing in front of the old fuse box. When we wake them, they claim to have no memory of how they got there other than the burning...

boy led them there. We tried locking the cellar door, but somehow they still get in. I was beginning to feel concerned now. A burning boy? A fuse box? This was horribly personal. My wife and I, we all house smells of burning flesh and electricity. Just being inside the property makes our skin tingle. There's an inescapable atmosphere. It's like just walking through the door instills an unspeakable And my children, they're afraid of the burning boy now. They say he wants them to do something, but they won't tell us what. We've sealed up the fuse box, but every night now we find them in front of it. And last week, my wife and I woke up down in the cellar with them.

We've put the property on the market, but as soon as anyone comes to view it, they leave and never call back. I don't know what to do. I don't want my family to stay here. I'm scared. I was hoping you could help. But what could I do or say? How would explaining my own childhood electrocution help this man?

If what he said was true and I was haunting this house, what on earth could he do about it? Hell, even I had no idea what it could really be. Nothing about it made sense or correlated with anything I knew about how ghosts should work. Then I looked at the property listing. I saw how, in their desperation, the wrong. Robertson family had listed the house for so much cheaper than the house was worth, and that's how I helped. I bought my childhood home. The chances of this being some weird scam were minimal. The Robertson stood to lose a good few grand on the sale. I even gave them slightly more than the

asking price. I could afford it. I guess I felt partly responsible too, and I suppose my skepticism and nostalgia for the old house trumped any concern about it being haunted by what a specter of my very much living self i was a fool i don't know what it is or how it is but there's something in this house i persuaded madeline to stay back at our apartment while i checked out the house for a few days i don't know why i wanted to be alone there i told her it was the memories. I think, deep down, I knew there was a reason to be afraid. On the first night, nothing happened. Everything was fine, and the next morning I lamented the Robertson's loss and celebrated my acquisition of the house I'd so loved growing up in. The next night,

I awoke in my childhood bedroom to the smell of singed flesh and hair. The atmosphere was electric, tingling through my body as a muggy, oppressive heat caused sweat to form on my brow. I sat up, ambiguously afraid of nothing in particular, until exhaustion took me a few hours later and I drifted back off. On the third night, I saw him. I awoke with a jolt to much the same smell and sensation, only this time it was considerably stronger. and there at the foot of my bed stood the burning boy.

It was me. There was no doubt about that, but the burns which covered his body were far worse than I had ever suffered. Smoke drifted from his pallid frame as he watched me with accusing eyes. There was no question that this spectre had my face, but he was no ghost. How could he be? I was the man this child had grown up to become, sitting there, shivering in bed, a man of flesh and blood and very much living.

The burning boy opened his mouth to reveal coal black teeth and a rotten, stumpy tongue that twitched as he tried to speak. A foul my asthma wafted towards me. That of electrical death, years-long decay. I gagged, too frozen with fear to leave my bed too terrified to approach this phantom. There, paralyzed with dread, I could only watch and listen, as the boy struggled to force words out of his destroyed mouth. At first they sounded like a hiss, a low, monotone whisper that set my teeth on edge.

As I listened, the noise grew loud. The flat, low hum made way for staccato crests. The boy's tongue vibrating against his teeth, as his lips moved uselessly. The sound grew louder, pitching up at intervals. It passed through me. Deep into my bones, I could feel it travelling up my spine, vibrating my back teeth. All at once it became a familiar sensation.

It was electricity. It was the sound of an electrical current. I could see the child's throat shifting up and down as the sound droned from his mouth. It filled my ears until it became unbearable. And then, only then, did I hear the words hidden within the hum. Rasping, clicking, jolts of speech. The taste of copper flooded my mouth. The boy repeated this simple phrase over and over again

until it felt like the words themselves were coursing through my body, crackling with energy as they ricocheted around my brain. And then, just as it felt they'd become too much that I could no longer listen, the words faded into that low, indecipherable hum until eventually the note ended. The final formata passing between the boy's child, lips like a whisper smoke. In the silence, our eyes were locked. I could not look away. I don't know how long we held that staring contest. I don't know at what point I drifted off to sleep.

All I remember is waking up the next morning, my sheep drenched with sweat and the faint smell of electricity searing the air. On the fourth night, I awoke in the cellar. My eye snapped awake just in time to see my hand reaching out for the fuse box. At some point, the Robertsons had padlocked it, but now the padlock lay unlocked and discarded on the floor. I hadn't even been given the key. I couldn't see the Burning Boy. I knew he was there, behind me.

I could sense him, smell him, could feel the electrical discharge coming off his chest. terrifying tiny form urging me forward. I could hear him snuffling and snorting. Laughter, I thought. With a cry, I snatched my hand away from that dreaded fuse box, ran upstairs, gathered some things, and drove to a nearby hotel. The next day I returned to the apartment I share with Madeline. I gave her some story about how living in the house would be too painful due to memories of my parents. I'm not sure if she believed me, but, bless her, she let it go. I told her I planned to flip the property, knowing I never could. I could never

willingly allow anyone, family or not, to be exposed to the burning boy. My plan was to keep the property empty, and maybe one day bring myself to have it demolished and sell off the land. My plan isn't going to work. At first I started smelling his electric stench around the apartment. Madeline could smell it too, although not as strongly as I claimed to. Initially this gave me hope. If we could both smell it, then maybe it was something tangible, corporeal, genuine faulty wiring.

Who knows? I was naive. It was wishful thinking. Deep down I knew that. Nonetheless, the first time I saw him in my own apartment, I thought I was dreaming. Despite all I'd seen,

all I'd experienced, I thought it had to be a nightmare. The house was haunted, not me. He couldn't be here. He couldn't. But he was. He stood in the corner staring at me as if he wanted something. At first, that's all he did.

On the first few nights I saw him, he simply stared. When he eventually began his horrible electric symphony, that's when I knew I'd never escaped the burning boy. As before, his lament buried its way into my bones, my head. not as strongly as that night in Southwick House, not quite as powerful, but it was building, and building, and building. One night in sleep-deprived desperation,

I even spoke to him, whispering so as not to wake Madeline. I reached out to this wraith of my childhood self. The very effort of moving my lips felt Herkulean, bordering on the impossible. I croaked out the words I'd long to ask. Beside me, Madeline stirred in her sleep, letting out a small moan. The boy regarded me with a stare that spoke volumes.

Sparks danced behind his eyes, which twinkled cruelly in the darkness. He opened his mouth, a yawning abyss behind soot-stained teeth. His ragged tongue flicked, and the sound that emerged was that of a switch being thrown. a heavy mechanical clunk that was immediately followed by those same familiar buzzing words, as loud as they had ever been, a live current of my own making. I didn't try to speak to the boy again after that. Regardless, I knew what he wanted. It was pretty obvious.

And when one night I woke up in the cellar of Southwick again, over two hours from the bed I'd fallen asleep in, I knew that the Burning Boy wouldn't stop until he got what he sought. Mercifully, it doesn't happen every night. Sometimes I have a week's reprieve, two if I'm lucky. But eventually the Burning Boy returns, and eventually I wake up in that basement with no memory of how I got there,

no memory of making the drive across the county. I don't know how to really. myself of him. I can't find a single thing in any paranormal literature that could help me. I can't turn to religion. I doubt he can be exercised. He's not a ghost. I'm still alive. He shouldn't exist. Did a part of me die and come back? Could I ever have that kind of malevolence inside me that spawned this thing? I know he wants me to finish the job, to grip the fuse box and let the current take me, and I won't lie. I've thought about doing just that. Every time I wake up in the cellar of that a cursed house, but I have a horrible feeling about that too. You see, it clearly wasn't just me

that the Burning Boy wanted. He was after the Robertsons, too, after all. And here's the thing. I found out last weekend that the entire Robertson family was killed in their new home. I don't know how they died. Not yet.

But I do know it was a freak accident. I can hazard a guess at the nature of that accident. And the day they died? It was the day before the Burning Boy began appearing in my apartment. far from Southwick House. So here's my problem. I think if I ever do reach out for the fuse box

and finish what I started when I was six years old, I won't be freeing the burning boy. I think I'd be strengthening him. I think I'd be joining him. When sharing manly tales with a group of friends at a bar one night, a man recalls an experience he had, which his friends have trouble believing. But we believe author Stephen Shrembach

when he shares this tale about how the man discovered something very odd indeed deep inside a forest in his home state of Alaska. Performing this tale are Peter Lewis, Jessica McAvoy, Jesse Cornett, and Dan Zapula. So when telling a story, remember, sometimes you have an unwelcome audience. Always had a,

weird group of friends. They all went into manly careers like logging, oil rig work, construction. I'm the black sheep of our little group of high school buddies. I went into IT. They give me shit all the time about working on nerd stuff, and I give them shit back. Me, no likey computer, me dig holes. I'm an unlikely addition to their group of friends, but it works somehow. So there we are in a bar. This is one of those rare occasions when everyone's back in town together and we're getting drunk, swapping stories about horrors on the job. Someone talks about when part of their oil rig blew up, killing three people a few years ago.

Danny, an actual lumberjack, talks about seeing a guy working not ten feet from him, get his arm torn clean off by a log line, just a quick zip, and a limb went flying. He held a shirt to the wound as the man bled out, babbling and whining in agony, until a life flight came two hours too late. All the while I'm sitting there knowing I've got a story. But it's not the kind of story I'd usually bring up to a bunch of drunk sort of friends. Not the kind of story I tell anybody. It's the kind of truly unsettling memory that you worry.

Should you tell it? You might give it life. You might feed it somehow, make it more real. I carry it around in the back of my mind like a caged, dangerous animal, not considering letting it out. Everyone's said something already, and I'm just sitting there looking sheltered, looking obvious. So I ignore that voice in my head that says, don't. I ignore my dry, tightening throat. Don't.

I've got one. Cracks, and they look surprised. I'm surprised. They all give me doubtful, amused looks. Go on then, the looks say. So I do. I work from home on our 30 acres outside. of a small town in Alaska. I live alone. No, kids. It's a college town, just a small liberal arts

college of a few hundred, but it's the heart of the town. The campus is huge, with the natural beauty of the area being a big draw. Reservation land neighbors the campus and the tribe sort of acts like park rangers for the hundreds of miles of forest trails. My own land borders part of the campus on the other side. One day, I'm out at the edge of the cleared part of my property right behind my house. It's probably about 200 yards from the house. I'm watering a set of raised beds I have right near the tree line, just enjoying the scorching sunny day.

And that's when something weird happens. There's this sound like a record of someone speaking coming from a few hundred feet into the woods. It's like someone talking to you through a bad cell connection where only parts of the words are coming through and it's just noise, but you can tell it's supposed to be words. It just stood there, listening to the noise, curious but not afraid. I didn't even turn the hose off. I think, looking back, that's why it took me so long to get freaked out to start taking it seriously. Weird things like that. Supernatural things happen at night, deep in the woods, not at 1 o'clock in the afternoon,

while standing right in your backyard. After about 30 seconds, it just stops. I turned the water off then to figure out if it actually stopped or just got quieter. Nothing. I file it away as a minor oddity. Something to be brought up later as a casual conversation token or more likely forgotten. That was my first regret. Fast forward a couple of weeks.

I'm on a hike at the back of my property on one of the trails I started last summer. which is pretty overgrown at this point. I'm strolling, lost in thought, beneath tree cover, simply enjoying the gorgeous midsummer weather. I'm pulled from my thoughts when I hear that odd sound in the woods. Far in the distance, there's the sound of garbled human speech. The forest around me, though, is oddly quiet. No, I'm not much of a risk-taker, and I generally prefer looking irrational to looking dead.

I casually turn and walk back towards the trail entrance, not wanting to encourage any large predators by fleeing suddenly. What the hell is making that sound anyway? I resolved to bring Danny along to check it out when he comes to visit in two weeks. Two weeks later, I'm back at the trailhead, alone, because Danny bailed on me. I told him that if I died, I would be coming straight to his apartment to haunt the shit out of him. Now, I'm looking down the seemingly innocuous forest trail. I steal myself. I check my pack, bear spray, and brand-new buoy knife, which I have no idea how to use.

Just a sound. I start down the path. A few miles and about an hour in, I hear the first signs of that odd sound in the distance. It's maybe a hundred yards ahead and just off the side of the trail. The forest, however, moves and rustles with life in that familiar, reassuring way. I carry on. As I approach the origin of the sound, I put my hand to the hilt of my buoy knife. The source of the sound, now within 20 feet or so, is not immediately apparent.

It's the same stream of incoherent babble, but with a distinct crackling sound to it. Looking up, I see a small black speaker fixed to a tree about 10 feet from the ground. Fairly confident the speaker poses no threat, I take my hand from my knife and inspect it. Written on the side of the speaker in white paint is the name of the local college and the words forestry department. A clue and a reasonable explanation. Go figure, you jumpy prick. Content that I won't have to stab anything or haunt any apartments this day. I head back home.

During a slow day the next week, I call the forestry department of the college. Yes, I'd like to speak to the dean. No, I'm not a student. No, they don't know I'm calling. The dean answered in a bored voice, but seemed eager to answer my questions, as if I were the highlight of an otherwise mundane day. As it turns out, the speaker is, or was, a sort of live art project in which students could write and record poems to be spoken aloud in the forest. It's solar-powered, but he suspected that the connection to the speaker I found had gone bad.

Once per semester, someone was supposed to come out and upload new MP3s to a waterproof MP3 player near the base of each tree. He went on to say that they discontinued the project due to outcry from the nearby tribe. Initially, he ignored their requests to take down the speakers, but the vice president of the college eventually stepped in when complaints persisted, worried about souring good relations with the tribe. They'd probably missed my station when they went to take them all down, he'd said. Mystery solved. Hiking season passes without incident.

About a month after the snows finally melt, I decide to take another hike on the trail with the speaker. I've got some overnight camping gear with me, and I plan to camp out near my turnaround point a few hours away. I almost miss the speaker when I'm about an hour in. It's completely silent now. I stopped to poke at the electronics a bit, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it. The fraying connections appear to have finally worn out over the winter.

I continue down the trail. About two hours later, I've set up my tent and prepared a simple camp. It's late afternoon, but I'm restless, and with a few hours of daylight left, I decided to walk ahead of my turnaround point for a little bit. I pick a little offshoot trail that leads upward, perhaps with the promise of a nice view. Just a few minutes into the walk, my mind is drifting. I'm just soaking up the late afternoon sun and basking in the first good weather of the season. I've picked the perfect time to explore.

Damn, this is nice, I think to myself. And a moment later, I hear that familiar. unsettling sound of speaking in the distance. I pause on the trail, my brain's still registering the noise as something innocuous. This sound is a little different, and even so far away, I can tell that it's a higher quality than the first speaker. I get closer and have to go a little off the trail to make out the words. It's definitely missing that crackly sound so I can easily make out the words. It's the sound of a woman reading poems, just as the dean said. Less perturbed than I once was, I decide to sit on a rock

near the speaker, pull out my water, and take a little break. I'm sitting there listening to the sounds of the forest and the voice reading the familiar poems. It's a little bit of the world. It's a It still feels a little eerie, though, and after just a few minutes, I decide it's time to get going again. I toss my water bottle into my pack and stand to leave, and that's when I hear the other voice. Someone nearby is babbling these crazy nonsense words. I perk up, curious, but not yet afraid. It has this strange, warbling sound, like the natural rise and fall of pitch in a sentence, but in all of the wrong places. Like someone turning random words in a sentence into questions.

It's the kind of sound you'd laugh at. If you weren't alone in a forest, miles and miles from help. The forest goes dead silent around me. as if flipping a switch. The sound begins trailing close through some thick brush in front of me. I'm totally frozen in place, just listening to this ridiculous noise

like a giant basso baby voice. What the f? See, just a glimpse of something coming through the brush and then my trance is broken. My conscious mind is slammed to the backseat as my animal instinct. send me sprinting back toward the trail. I'm already careening back down the trail before I even realize what I was running from,

and then it hits me. A wall of realization, a great towering cloud of cold crippling realization. I actually stumble. My neurons fire in slow motion. The implications are forming in my mind like a slowly condensing water droplet just before the release. And then, the fall. My chest tightens and I take a sudden, sharp breath. It was a hand.

Some sort of elongated, grotesque hand reaching through the brush, a body to match. a body to match that distorted voice. It's then that I hear it again on the path right behind me. Like it's learned a phrase for the first time and it's trying it out. Only it has this odd pleading quality to it. So, fuck, I'm running. I'm barely touching the ground, feet flying down the tight forest trail in the the late afternoon sun.

Tree branches are slapping at me as I barrel down the path, careless, mindless. My nerves are on a knife's edge for the entire sprint back to camp. Ears pricked, skin covered in goosebumps. I enter a clearing and slow to walk cautiously into camp. My hand hovering lightly over my buoy knife. I see my tent in the small. clearing where the main trail splits into these smaller tributaries. The tent sits in the shade, flap partially open. I stop staring at it. It would take about ten minutes to pack it up.

I contemplate it for about half a second. Nope, I'm moving again, back on the main trail now. I'm holding a sustainable jog, but after about 30 seconds, I slide to stop because I hear something new. I hear nothing, quiet, deeper than anything before. No distant birds, no rustling leaves, no quiet breeze or chirping insect. There is only complete and unnatural silence, almost suffocating. It's like having a giant glass jar dropped around me. One second, there's a rich blanket of forest sounds, and then the next, I'm in a vacuum.

I freeze. I can feel my heart pounding out of my chest, but otherwise I am as silent and still as the forest around me. The air is hot, still and dead on my sweaty skin like sun. standing in a silent summer attic occurs to me. An intuition. You'll always get that feeling like they're being watched, but this isn't quite like that. It's not like being watched.

It's like being examined. And my gut is telling me to blend in, to do what the bugs and the birds and the trees are doing. Sit the fuck still and wait. This isn't something you run from. Do as they do and survive. I wait. Frozen in an awkward position mid-stride, mid-breadthewroth, refusing to even blink or look around.

I stand there like a store mannequin in the closet watching through wooden slats as Something very bad looks back through the slats at me, trying to figure out if I am actually a mannequin or just something pretending. We look at each other like that, this force and eye for ten seconds. My head is swimming with terror a second. My lungs are screaming for air and my heart is pounding a frantic drum. Still, it examines me. And suddenly the gaze is broken. It's focus on something else.

My vision narrows to a pinpoint because my brain is clamoring for oxygen. A rustle of leaves. So slowly it comes my way. Not the rustle of a creature, but a great collective exhale from the forest. The sound of the forest returns in a great sweep past me. I bend, put my hands to my knees, and join in with a heaving gasp of my own. The rest of the walk is calm but cautious, a steady hike for two hours into the early evening. It's getting dark by the time I get back to my car.

In the bar, my friends are all statue still, faces slack. No one has touched their drink in five minutes. My whole body is shaking as I absent-mindedly run the fingers of both hands up through my hair. It was like I was staring down the barrel of a gun. A gun I couldn't see, but I knew that if I had so much as twitched, I wouldn't be here right now. It would have known I was there. It would have known I was real. And I never went back.

I took a sip of my beer and a little grim satisfaction in my friend's stunned distant faces. They let out a few half-hearted, nervous. chuckles at my attempt to lighten the mood. But otherwise everyone seems intensely interested in their drinks, the table, or the floor. Shit, man. Yeah. Yeah. All pretty quiet and unusually pensive until we pay our tabs and leave the bar.

On the way out, one of my buddies pulls me aside and asks, Was that really true? all of it, I mean? I just sort of squint and look up at the star-strewn Alaskan sky. Eventually, the words I'm looking for come to me. There's shit out there that no one can explain. Things that don't have names, and I think every now and then someone will come across one. The smart people, the lucky people, like me, are the ones who get to tell their stories.

He looks at me for a moment longer than seemingly content with my answer. He nods and walks to his car. Night. Night. Of course, I don't tell him there's more. I don't tell him that it wasn't some ethereal, invisible form. staring me down in the woods. It was a monster. A lanky, horrid, yet somehow human thing. It was in the shape of a man, but it was no man. God gave me two gifts that day. The first was sparing my life, and the other was keeping that creature in the

the periphery of my vision. I did tireless research after that incident in the forest. I found out about a missing, homeless man and the dismembered corpse the cops found in the woods, uh, parts of a corpse anyway. And I found out about something called the Akadakseidi. A follow-up call to the professor from the nearby university got me that, and it got me a meeting with the grandson of the shaman who asked the university to take the speakers down. I met with him the very next day. I don't know how well I can explain it. I don't think of it the same way my grandfather does. I follow up immediately, eager. Try me. You know how everything that's alive today has some of the same DNA? Like,

Like if you go back far enough, we all have a common ancestor, even really different things like germs. Well, I don't think the Akadoksi are in that family tree. I think they come from something else. He sort of trails off, perhaps expecting skepticism from me. Two days ago, maybe, but he doesn't know that I have good reason not to be a skeptic. These things aren't a joke, you know. People at the college think my grandfather is crazy.

They only listen to him because he's respected in the tribe. But even though they respect him, most of the tribe thinks he's crazy too. Do you think he's crazy? About the Akadikseedee. He looks grave and the sudden seriousness from such a young man surprises me. The weight of his stare hints at a wisdom beyond his his apparent age and somewhat flippant appearance. No, he's not crazy.

He's not crazy because I saw one. This was like five or six years ago, and I was maybe 13. I was out in the woods on my ATV, just weaving through the trees and going too fast. I was a stupid kid then. I did a lot of stupid shit. Anyway, I'm in some pretty sparse woods, so it's easy. easy to see far off, and I see this animal laying down in the distance. I turn my ATV to get closer, and I can tell it's a deer. As I'm pulling up to it, I cut the engine and just roll to a stop

about 20 feet from the thing. I think it must be heard or something, because its back legs aren't working, and it's pulling itself along by its front blades. Thinking I'll need to kill it, I go to pull out my knife. As soon as I reached down, this thing's head just snaps towards me. And I don't mean it heard a sound and sort of looked around then saw me. It just immediately jerked its head right towards me. It didn't look right. It was like someone tried to make a deer, but didn't have all the right parts. It was all twisted and gangly with these nasty swollen eyes just staring at me. And I got this feeling like it was trying to figure me out, trying to figure out what I was, completely still. And then a couple seconds later, it just turned and kept dragging itself away. I pushed my ATV as

fast as it would go back to the house. That's when my grandfather told me about the Akadakseidi. He said they were bad spirits that spawn deep in the forest. They're attracted to signs of life, noise, sight, stuff like that. And when they find something alive, they sort of copy it, but they disassemble it first. Once they've copied something, they try and find more of it to make a better copy. I don't really know why. This is just what he told me. Most of the time, they're harmless.

Every now and then, one shows up in the shape of a deer or dog or something, and then the shaman go out and take care of it. So, what did they do about the one you saw? They went out to find a deer, a real deer. When they caught one, they brought it to the Akadokidi. The only way to kill them is to make them copy something already dying. We sat in silence there for a moment. Drinks forgotten.

I saw one. What? And I think I know why your grandfather wanted the speakers taken down. What he was afraid of, it happened. Wait, slow down. What are you talking about? There's a huge. Human, a catechiti out there.

A few hours later, we're standing at the trailhead behind my property. It's turning into evening now, with only about an hour of real daylight left. There is a group of men nearby from Ida's tribe, shaman, talking to each other in hushed voices. Behind them are a dozen or so women and children, and some of the women are crying. Ida, what's going on? He motions for me to wait as the circle of shaman breaks up. An older man in his early 60s, who I assume his Ida's grandfather, walks over to us at the entrance to the trail. He doesn't stop to talk to us, but just nods his head in our direction and continues past us down the trail.

He has a wiry sort of strength to him despite his age, and the feathered garb and war paint on his body. lend him an air of danger. I can see an ornate stone dagger on his belt as he goes. Eventually, I speak. When is he coming back? Ida just gives me this flat, mournful look. He isn't coming back. And then Ida's words from before ring in my ear. The only wait kill them is to make them copy something already dying. 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 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.