The NoSleep Podcast - S25 Ep5: NoSleep Podcast S25E05

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

It's Episode 05 of Season 25. The frequency of fear brings you tales about surviving after loss."Clown Heads" by Em Starr (Story starts around 00:04:20)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by Claudius MooreCast: Joey - Atticus Jackson, Amy - Sarah Ruth Thomas, Chessie - Mary Murphy, Doreen - Erin Lillis, Hank - Dan Cummins, Hank’s Wife - Lynze Cummins"Forever Plastic Playhouses" by Patrick Malka (Story starts around 00:29:15)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by Phil MichalskiCast: Narrator - Peter Lewis"Leviathan" by Juan Cardenas (Story starts around 00:51:20)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by Phil MichalskiCast: Narrator - Graham Rowat"Reasons This Is Not a Horror Story" by Barbara A. Barnett (Story starts around 01:10:50)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by Jeff ClementCast: Amanda - Linsay Rousseau, Karen-Monster - Katabelle Ansari, Jesse - Jeff Clement, Troy - Xalavier Nelson Jr."Oren" by Laura Cody (Story starts around 01:24:35)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by Jesse CornettCast: Maggie - Marie Westbrook, Mom - Mary Murphy, Daniel - Danielle McRae, Office Manager - Jeff Clement, Teacher - Wafiyyah White, Hannah - Erin Lillis, Voice - Katabelle AnsariThis episode is sponsored by:Home Chef - Home Chef's meal kits are rated #1 in quality, convenience, value, taste, and recipe ease. Head to homechef.com/nosleep to get 50% off your first box plus free dessert for life and of course, free shipping on your first box!Quince - Build your wardrobe with pieces from Quince that mix well and last. Go to Quince.com/nosleep to get free shipping and a 365-day return period.Click here to learn more about The NoSleep Podcast teamClick here to learn more about the Scared to Death PodcastClick here to learn more about Patrick MalkaClick here to learn more about Barbara A. Barnett Executive Producer & Host: David CummingsMusical score composed by: Brandon Boone"Forever Plastic Playhouses" illustration courtesy of Alia SynesthesiaThe NoSleep Podcast is Human-made for Human Minds. No generative AI is used in any aspect of work.Audio program ©2026 - Creative Reason Media - 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. No part of this audio program may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. All rights reserved.

Subsonic closely as you brace yourself for the no sleep You're listening to the No Sleep Podcast. Thanks for making us part of your horror soundtrack. I'm your host, David Cummings. I'm excited for this episode because we have two special voice actors joining us and there are no strangers to horror podcasting. Dan and Lindsay Cummins run their bad,

Magic Productions Empire by producing wonderfully funny and scary shows like Time Suck and Scared to Death. It's the Scared to Death podcast that they'll be bringing to the Crime Wave at Sea 2.0 crews in February. Dan and Lindsay are great people, and I knew I wanted to get them on the show to play some kooky characters. And if you aren't already, make sure you check out the Scared to Death podcast. In it, Dan tries to scare Lindsay with researched accounts. the paranormal, including demonic possessions, shadow people, cryptids, and alien abductions. And Lindsay fights back by sharing chilling true horror stories submitted by their listeners. Like I said, it's fun and freaky and a perfect companion for the kinds of stories we tell.

And if you're wondering about their surname, Cummins, there's no need to at me because you think this is some sort of family-influenced nepo sort of thing. Their name is spelled Cummins without the G that I'm famous for. Wait, am I famous for that? I'm not even famous at all. Regardless, while I'm sure our lineage can be traced back to the Highlands of Scotland in centuries past, I don't believe we share any recent familial connections. The only connection we really share, and the only one that counts,

is that we're in the family of sharing creepy horror stories with our listeners. Check the show notes to learn more. about scared to death and make sure you listen to their episodes. I have no doubt you'll get hooked on being scared to death. Now on our episode this week, we deal with things that are no longer here. No, no, I'm not necessarily talking about ghosts. It's more about the things we've lost in our lives. Loss brings grief and grief can bring guilt. These things can be a normal part of life, But when we're haunted by profound loss, the grief can manifest physically, turning into hallucinations or malicious entities. We'll meet people who process their grief in ways that show the horror can remain long after the loss.

Now, brace yourself for the frequency of fear. In our first tale, we meet Joey. He's joined a traveling carnival and is tasked to be a fair. face painter. Ah, but not the kind of face painter you might expect at a carnival. You see, in this tale, shared with us by author M. Starr, Joey is told to paint the faces of an old game's rather creepy heads that spit out balls, and there's one face in particular that unsettles Joey. This tale has been produced by Claudius Moore, and features performances by Atticus Jackson, Sarah Thomas, Mary Murphy, Aaron Lillis, and Dan and Lindsay Cummins.

So step right up and play the game, if you dare. Just don't be too creeped out by the clown heads. Doreen Luck has 13 clown heads. They stare at you with crooked eyes and hand-painted smiles, red has pig's blood. They grin and turn and grin and turn as you try to score that giant plush kangaroo for your girlfriend. Then they spit balls into shoots that earn you cheap rubber pythons and make your hand-holding stink like tar sweat. They're ugly things with peeling faces and pyrro caps. But Doreen loves her clownheads.

She inherited them from her daddy, and he from his daddy before him. And when she recovers, she'll follow the Carnival Trail north like they did. In the meantime, Chessie says we should all pitch in to keep the lucky laughers operating. Family is as family does, she reckons. She's narrow-shouldered with steely eyes, and when she starts delegating from behind the stalls and thrillers, and thrill rides, people listen. She wants us to do something special for Doreen. There's something more meaningful than dead flowers and gift cards.

She scans the familiar crew, finds me in the shadows. Face painter. And although I've barely been here for a fortnight, she says I'm the one for the job. She wants me to repaint the clownheads. All 13 wide-mouthed gestures. That would be fine for 12 of them, but not for number nine. The ninth clown is different to the others.

It reeks of rotting burlap and old glue. Its face a melted mask of plaster of Paris, with paint that drips in colored blisters. Its mouth is wide and crumbling, like someone used a hammer to fit something inside and never bothered to fix it. Doreen told me, before the incident, that she had to repaint it every night. If she didn't, it frightened the children. I'd asked her once why she kept it. He's vintage.

His brothers are fiberglass, far less trouble. But he was the first of the laughers. Granddad luck would turn in his grave if I got rid of him. Doreen spoke about her family a lot. A third generation showy raised on corn dogs and hard work. She told me how her daddy taught her to work her crowd and paid her in cotton candy. How he said her voice was like a wooden ball, caught inside a car. clown's throat, and she had to spit it out.

That she was painting clown faces before she could walk. Sometimes, when the crowds were thin and my face painting stand sat quietly beside her stall, she would ask about my family. I told her each time that I had none. That's all right, love. We're all one big family here. At night when the gates closed in the cleanup crew, started, Doreen would stay up painting. Most of the community had trailers, but I slept on a

cheap bed roll under the stars and found comfort in the glow that fell through the cracks of her canvas shutters and the calliopee tune that danced into the early hours as she worked. In the morning, number nine would have a shiny new face, and by closing time, it would always be There's no glow from Doreen's stall tonight. No comforting tune on the breeze. The air is thick with the smell of deep-fried donuts and diesel. The collective ghost of perfume and armpits. And it's hot.

Too hot for slumber. I wonder what the clown will look like tomorrow. If its face will be melting behind the canvas. shudders. When sleep finally comes, I dream of a grave of burlap and glue. Hank the hot dog vendor

takes first shift at the laughers. He leaves his wife in charge of the food truck and they scream at each other across the grounds. Their voices amplified in the stagnant air. Where's the mustard? It's in the refrigerator.

Under the bench. What? It's under the bench. Where? The refrigerator. I'm looking there now. I don't see it. Open your fucking eyes.

He's a repugnant man, hovering over customers as they feed wooden balls into clown holes. Handed out plastic consolation prizes with a nicotine grin. But even Hank thinks number nine is creepy. That's why there's an out-of-allation prizes. of water sign taped over its face today. That thing looked fucking evil this morning. Look just like my dying grandmother. I'm painting tiger stripes on a child's face when he tells me.

And the kid's father isn't impressed. Hank doesn't care about the fragility of townsfolk. He cares about Doreen. Tells me she's family, and family takes care of family. stops mid-sentence to yell at his wife because the hot dog cue is moving too slow. He opens a crumpled cigarette pack, lights one up with an unsteady hand. They checked the security footage this morning.

She ate that fucking ball. The offended dad pays early, ushering his tiger cub toward the showbag stand. He's glancing over his shoulder, and I can see that the kid is crying. She points to the lucky laughers, to the ninth clown where the out-of-order sign is peeled away. Says it's the monster that lives under her bed. I don't blame her. Hank hurries to conceal the face. This thing has fucking history.

Doreen's grandfather brought it over from the old country. The barrier, some shit. He wraps extra duct tape around its black yoke eyes. takes a relieved drag off his cigarette as he checks out his handiwork. I don't envy you having to paint it. Wrecking you drew the short straw. I shrug. I'm not scared of clowns.

I'm not scared of them either. Just that one. He parks his stool beside me. Joey, yeah? Yep. He's asked me four times already. He shelves a cigarette between his lips, extends a greasy handshake. I'll you an apology, Joey.

Until they found that footage, I thought it might have been you that did it. I was hosing popcorn vomit from a spinning car when they found Orine. It was opening day in Manassas, overcast with clouds that weren't delivering. Typical moody Virginian summer. Attendance was patchy, cues were short, and I'd painted three faces since the gates opened, two butterflies and a cat demon. So I figured I had time to impress the Tilt of World Girl with a chivalrous cleanup. I was making eyes at her across the water arc, waiting for the last beats of,

You shook me all night long to catch her name when an ambulance cut through the fairground. It was headed for sideshow alley, so I passed the hose and followed. There was a gathering at the clown heads. Doreen's body had been hidden amongst the stuffed toys. She was wedged between a pink koala and a plush banana, tennis shoes poking out at the bottom. The lucky laughing clowns banner flapped overhead and looping hand-painted letters, but she didn't look so fortunate when the...

they dragged her from the prize pool, bits of dirty string coming with her. Doreen, who loved a good chinwag, her mouth always working like the heads she owned and operated. Well, her lips were still and blue, and the resuscitation compressions were barely budging her sternum. I swear they were about to call it. One of the EMTs checking his watch as if he had better places to be when she started to cough. And clutch had her throat. Like there was something lodged inside it. They rolled her to the side and struck her back.

She spat out a ball with a number on it. The number was nine. The Tilt of World girl's name is Amy. We share a joint behind the hot donut truck and her lip balm makes the paper taste like raspberry jam. When we pass the smoke, our fingers linger. Her nails are unpainted, the tip stained with axle grease. She tells me she's in charge of assembling the ride as well as operating. I can strip her down in two hours 40.

I believe her. She was born into the carnival game, like Doreen, with cousins on the dodgums, you know bumper cars, and ghost train. I watch her as she talks. I like her pixie haircut, the way it curls beneath her ears and all longer jawline. When she starts asking questions, I silence her with a kiss, exhaling smoke into her lungs. She pulls away to make O-rings against the night sky. You'd better paint those clowns tonight if you want to keep your job. Jesse doesn't play.

Jesus Christ, the laughers. A vision of number nine cuts through the flower haze, and suddenly the air smells like pig shit. I can keep you company. Our fingertips romance. I love to watch an artist work. Doreen's stand is different from the inside. With the shutters down, it's dark and hot.

The internal air parched of oxygen. Amy finds a solar battery to power up the fans and cantonas. It lights up the clown heads, all 13 of them. The out-of-order sign still taped to the ninth. A Calliope tune starts to play. Weird. There's no sound system in here. I work to the steam whistle soundtrack, beginning with clown number one. Doreen's paint set is old acrylics and dirty brushes.

I make do with what's there. Amy finds a bottle of paint thinner. Do you need to strip them back first? I doubt these have ever been stripped back. Looks like Doreen just paints over the top, so I'm going to follow her lead. It probably has a hundred different faces under there. Maybe not this one. But clown number nine.

I color my way along the row and Amy leans in close. Her breath, a heady mix of bubble gum and paint fumes. The fiberglass faces are simple enough. White bases with inky eyebrows and matching eyes. And primary hues for the cone hats. I paint the map. Miles Red, gritting hard against Black Hole throat shoots. Who taught you how to do this?

My brother. He insisted we do art therapy when he was going through chemo. Fuck cancer. Did he beat it? He died three weeks ago. I keep the brushstrokes steady, despite my wavering hand. Shit. Sorry.

Amy touches my arm. We don't have to talk about it if you don't want. And I don't want to talk about Charlie. How a good man can waste away to merrile his bones and paper skin. How he can go from brother and father and art teacher and football coach to dad. How toward the end, he painted faces on plaster masks with his family to help them process their grief. How his bed was surrounded by those masks. Some angry, most sad.

Some beautiful like angels. How I would sit with him and paint them too. The last one, too painful to finish. I didn't stick around for his funeral. I don't tell her that either. I give her the abridged version. Skip to the part when the carnival came to town, and I asked Chessie Field for a job. And she told me all she had was a face-painting gig.

Can you paint faces, she had asked, steel gaze fixed and judging. And I told her, yes, I could. Amy is no longer listening. She's over at the ninth clown, eyes glassy. She's peeling off the duct tape and the out-of-order sign. She's reaching for the wooden balls and feeding them into its crumble hole and calling it Charlie and Doreen and Granddaddy Luck. She's dropping one after another down the shoot

till she hits the perfect score. One point, two points, three points. Nine. She repeats the number over and over as she rifles through the prize pool. Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. She finds a rubber snake and coils it around her tongue. Nile's her head back and opens her jaw, feeds the python down her throat. She starts to gag and foam and choke.

And still, she forces it down. She's shocked when I pull it back out. Nine! She rushes at me. Amy, what are you doing? She steps back, wipes the spittle from her lips. Tells me she doesn't feel so good.

That the paint fumes are making her sickly. And maybe she should get an early night. Maybe she'll see me tomorrow. Maybe I should hurry up and paint that fucking clown face. Maybe, maybe, maybe. She leaves me in Doreen's tent with one laugher left to finish. Number nine doesn't like its new face. It eats the acrylic, melting freshly colored features into fault lines,

running yellows into blues, into reds, still its mouth is stained black. I paint and repaint, and paint, and paint, and re-paint. and still it drips and blisters. I try the thinner, expecting to peel back a thousand faces. But the outer parts crumble, opening your cavity from cheekbone to chin. There's something inside it.

I reach in, plaster dust burning as I push through layers of burlap and wood rot. Pull out a mask. It's the kind of mask. You paint with your brother when he's dying with black swirl eyes because you don't want to acknowledge your sadness So you smear and smudge and turn teardrops into warm holes I know this mask because I made it A death mask for Charlie to match his cancer face

an attempt to deflect grief with bad humor. His children were painting angels, and I made something that looked like their dying father. I'll never forget how it frightened them. It's okay, kids. Uncle Joey hasn't finished yet. He had said, forgiven me as always. And I wasn't finished that.

evening when I let myself in with the spare key and stole his last nine grand as he fever dreamed. Not finished when I took the cash to the Greyhound track to double it first, then repay it. Not finished when the bets were losing, when the beer lines ran dry, when I gambled the lot. Not even finished when I went back to look for more Woken with my hand beneath his mattress Saw him take his last shocked breaths Nine shallow staggered breaths His eyes telling me he knew

He knew The death mask turns to plaster dust in my hand, staining my skin, inky black. I look up and number nine is wearing it. Black swirl eyes dripping, jaw cracked wide and waiting. My brother's face grinning and turning and grinning and Turning, and pick up the paintbrush and open my mouth. Aim for the throat hole. Pray for absolution to a calliopee tune. Leapeless universe for even more.

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For a limited time, Home Chef is rated number one by users of other meal kits for quality, convenience, value, taste, and recipe ease. is offering sleepless listeners, 50% off and free shipping for your first box, plus free dessert for life. Go to homechef.com slash no sleep. That's homechef.com slash no sleep for 50% off your first box and free dessert for life. Homechef.com slash no sleep. Must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. Listen closely as we return to the frequency of Vee. If you've ever lived in a duplex apartment, you'll know that you're sharing a yard with your neighbor. And for the gentleman we'll soon meet. He and his partner notice their yard has a child's playhouse in it.

But in this tale, shared with us by author Patrick Malka, the couple doesn't think much about it, until the man starts to be the lone person who notices something very strange about it. This tale has been produced by Phil Mikulski and features a performance by Peter Lewis. So don't be too concerned about what you're seeing. It goes with the territory when you have Forever Plastic Playhouses. A house in the yard was there when we moved in.

Five feet at its peak, open windows and enough room for a couple of kids to fit inside. And pretend to eat luxurious meals made of dirt, sand, and grass clippings. The roof may have once been a vibrant red, but the molded plastic tiles had cracked and faded from the constant exposure to sunlight. Everyone knows plastic can't decompose,

but everyone forgets it can still degrade. Allison and I rented the duplex apartment. The yard was not ours. It was tended to, a semi-regular basis by the landlord's nephew, and that was it. All we saw from our bedroom window was this playhouse, sunk into the middle of a small patch of unused, fenced grassland. Allison, who obsessively scrolled through those lists of beautiful abandoned places, fell in love with it. This was our very own piece of abandoned architecture that we would see change over time.

Allison saw only a tiny plastic structure, but just as we had finished unpacking our last box, I saw the girl walk around over and through the playhouse's walls. Allison and I had recently learned that starting a family wasn't going to happen for us. We agreed we would look into other family planning options in the future, but that maybe we should just live in this for a while, You know, not rush into anything. Grieve proper over the loss of countless plans and visualizations. Scenes of full dinner tables take up mental real estate. It's hard to let them go. Allison and I were both looking out into the yard when I saw the girl that first time.

I knew Allison couldn't see her. The girl had straight brown hair with a single outward fur. flip at shoulder length, she had the pointed nose and round high cheekbones. From a distance I could tell her face was malleable and expressive. She was all limbs in a short sleeve t-shirt and jeans with embroidered sunflowers. I watched as she lined dandelions around the perimeter of the house, talking to herself, telling herself some fantastic story. She laughed at what was clearly her own which made me laugh, too. I was still watching when Allison, who had long since walked away,

poked her head back in the room and asked what I was still looking at. I said, uh, nothing, and offered to make dinner. Allison and I eventually bought the duplex from our aging landlord. We were doing well enough,

and even though buying property was never in our plans, This fit. Allison even had thoughts about the yard, the backyard gatherings of siblings and friends, their kids running around, playing, eating grilled food off compostable plates, having drinks until it got too dark to reach for refills,

making giant piles of leaves in the fall. And equally large snowmen in the winter, I used her own ideas to suggest we keep the playhouse. I wanted to continue to watch Sunny grow, and the playhouse seemed essential to that. Sunny, it's not a name I would have ever chosen, but the initial image of those embroidered sunflowers on her jeans stayed with me. It was five years later, and I'd been documenting her evolution from afar. She had grown taller, longer in that disproportionate way that she had grown. kids of about ten often look. I saw her so regularly I didn't always notice the changes, but on one

particularly hot summer day, Sunny was stretched over the top of the playhouse, her long limbs hanging over the sides, and it was clear how much bigger she'd gotten. She lay there, the peak of the house resting against her lower back. It looked painful. Pale skin of her face and arms was fully exposed to the sun. I worried she would get hurt or sunburned. This was careless, and I really felt like I should do something. But what could I do? There was nothing to do. I feared crossing a line and acknowledging that I'd been watching this very real to me, ghost. I also feared losing her. I would find her in that position on the roof so many times over the years that it didn't make sense to question her comfort. And yet, every time I wanted to go to her

and say, please, there has to be a better way to do that. An increasingly aggressive vine plant had made its way to our yard. It began enveloping the playhouse. I could never quite make out the species it never flowered, and the leaves were inconsistent. Some of it looked like plain old ivy. Other parts had five leaves in a circular pattern like a Virginia creeper, and all of it was as fast growing as kudzu. May have been a mix of all these species, but that just seemed so unlikely. Allison loved the look of it because of that obsession of hers with the old and overgrown.

She wanted to leave it. Allison always said if at any point it seemed like someone would like to use the playhouse, then we would strip the vines off and power wash the whole thing. It remained an interesting piece of yard art because all kids and most pets stayed away from it. I tried not to think too much about that. The vines made me uncomfortable. I didn't like that they were taking over Sunny's space,

it was all she had. All I could give her, and I was letting it fail. I was failing her. But I was so mortified at having to explain myself to my partner that I suffered that shame alone. Sonny would understand. Sunny knew I wouldn't let anything bad happen to the house. We had been living in the apartment for 15 years.

We loved our home, our problems. property. We made it thoroughly our own. We even loved our tenants in the upper apartment. In all that time, the prospect of adoption only came up once, but we'd grown comfortable and unable to see it anymore. Allison and I had weathered difficult times and remained at our best when we could turn over in the middle of the night and find the other's hand. Fingers and legs intertwined, this was all I needed. It took me long enough to figure that out. I began to see sunny less and less. She still appeared around the playhouse every now and then, but she looked to be almost 20 now, and I guess she didn't want to stay stuck in one place. I understood. I also missed her. I still thought of her as that little

girl with the two big t-shirt and embroidered jeans. She still still. She still. still wore those same items, but they had grown with her. The shirt fit more snugly over her chest and stomach, and the jeans became skinny, tapering snugly at her calf and ankle. I knew that she would be leaving me soon. I did not know how or win, only soon. And then the house turned on her. Sunny stumbled like she was drunk. She tricked. and fell in such a way that the upper half of her body went through the playhouse, leaving her legs motionless on the outside. I had seen her walk through those walls a million times, so I didn't think anything of it. I stared for some time and even laughed to myself, thinking

she must be sleeping it off. Then her hand poked through the other side, gripping loose vines and pulling herself forward. Her legs were... not moving. When her face made it through, she was crying. Her jaw locked in a sideways rictus. She was in tremendous pain. And still, her legs were not moving. She continued to pull herself forward, stopping occasionally to pound her forehead against the lawn. She reached her waist, where the rest of her body should have followed. I understood what I would see next. I whispered, no, no, no, no. I closed my eyes. I sang to myself, a Bonnie Prince Billy song I'd been listening to earlier. I sang through the lyrics of even if loved several times before opening my eyes. When I did, Sonny was gone. And I thought that may have been it. A brief and brutal goodbye. But I didn't believe it. It turns out I would miss my only other chance.

I got up early. My lower back hurt if I stayed in bed too long. An old injury and some extra weight kept me uncomfortable a lot of the time. My sleep was also disrupted by thoughts of sunny. Everything was still and quiet in early morning gray scale tones. I put on a pot of coffee and looked at. out the window, hoping to see her. She was there in front of the playhouse. She was covered up to her neck and creeping lines. This is it, I thought, there taking her. I only knew for sure because

she did something she had never done. She was staring at me, acknowledging my presence. I couldn't go to her. I couldn't start now. I could only watch. I wanted her to fight it, to do something, anything at all. Instead, she just, she looked anesthetized. The vines got tighter around her waist and chest constricting, making her breath obvious and labored. A steady stream of blood dripped off her fingertips.

The only exposed parts of her other than her neck and head. None of this registered on her face. She was calm, passive. Then the vines lifted her up and over, draping her over the top of the house where they stretched her limbs to the four corners of the structure. Her arms and legs snapping over the sides of the roof,

the vines flattened out. She was no longer held within them. She had melted. blended into the structure. And then it collapsed. The whole thing broke to pieces. When Allison ran into the kitchen, warned by the sound of a shattered cup,

she found me on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably unable to catch my breath. All I could say was, she's gone. Allison thought I was talking about the playhouse. Allison only asked, asked me to seek help when I set fire to the vines in our yard. The fire almost reached our home.

I was the one who suggested we sell the duplex and move out beyond the city and suburb. Allison and I could both work from home with occasional drives into the office. Allison was hesitant at first, but my enthusiasm and the romance of living out in the country soon infected her, too. I hadn't been enthusiastic about anything for some time. It was hard to leave our home, the place we'd made our own for the better part of two decades, even for me. After losing Sunny, though, the shine was off the place. I was never able to recover any sense of belonging. It was time to try something new. The move. was not easy. It was remarkable how much two people who claimed to be non-materialistic could

accumulate. Given time and storage space, we all put things aside for future use, even if that use is just as a reminder. Having to downsize forces you to consider what is actually important. But other than Allison, Sunny was the most important thing, and I had already lost her. lost to the playhouse. So what the fuck importance could an old book or my first concert t-shirt really have by comparison? Our new home was an A-frame-style cabin on a small piece of land surrounded by woods.

It was quiet, as long as you could withstand the sound of crickets and cicadas in the dead of summer. We weren't exactly roughing it. We were close to a small town, the plumbing and electricity were modern, and the Wi-Fi was reliable enough. I had time to focus on my wife, work, and to develop new hobbies like woodworking.

You know, my first project was to build a playhouse for the yard. Allison didn't like the idea. It had been a few years, but the pain that she saw in me, the pain I never really explained was still. fresh in her mind. I presented it as not knowing what to make, how it seemed like a fun little challenge. I spent so many years staring at our old one that I knew its dimensions well and thought I could recreate the whole thing with little difficulty. It would be different, made of eastern white pine instead of plastic, but I thought it could help me feel like this was,

you know, our new home. Allison relented. but not without finally explicitly letting me know that the playhouse was no longer a joyful object for her. She would still encourage me if it was truly what I wanted. And it was. My first attempt was good. Not perfect, but good. I even painted the roof red to simulate the molded tiles of the original. I was proud of myself.

Allison was proud of me. I had no expectations. I only hoped that Sunny would join us. The playhouse stood in the back of our home at the border of lawn and forest. The motion-activated floodlights I installed illuminated the entire space. It reassured Allison and allowed me a clear line of sight. I looked out the window several times a day. One night, the floodlights came on as I was getting a glass. of water. Not unusual, you know, we had raccoons and coyotes setting them off all the time, but still I always checked. No wild animals. Sunny stood next to the playhouse I built for her. The feeling of calm and elation only lasted a moment. Something was wrong.

Sunny's hair was longer than I had ever seen it. Disheveled. dry and rough hiding her face from me. She was always lanky, but her limbs were now uncannily long and pointed in the wrong direction. Or maybe they were fine, and only her neck was twisted around. It didn't last. The floodlights turned off and stayed off.

I stood in my kitchen for a long time, wondering what I'd done wrong. Allison left after my seventh attempt. She said she would be at her sisters, and she knew I'd find my way back to her soon. I felt really good about attempt number 12, so good, in fact, that I climbed inside of it to wait.

Oh, it took until late into the night. I was half asleep and complete. darkness when the floodlights turned on. Sunny had appeared in the house with me. She looked to be her five-year-old self, and everything was fine. More than fine, even. She lay down beside me and curled into the crook of my arm, and from her, I felt a radiating warmth and stillness in my chest I had not felt in years. As the vines that grew from Sunny's eyes and mouth began to envelop the playhouse, drowning us in a living darkness, I tried in vain to grab hold of her and whisper,

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Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's QI-N-C-E.com slash no sleep. Listen closely as we return to the frequency of fear. It's not uncommon for a person to take a job, which separate. operates them from their family. It's a necessary sacrifice to be apart for so long, across many miles. But in this tale, shared with us by author Juan Cardenas, we meet a man working as a harvester, and he's not just across the country from his wife, he's across the span of space itself. This tale has been produced by Phil Mikulski and features a performance by Graham Rowett.

So work may be grueling, but in the end, it just might be worth it as you work, the Leviathan. It's lunchtime on Leviathan. This is my favorite time of day. I stop the tractor. It's gently humming engine slowly winds down as I open the hatch into the cabin. There's space for about two people to stand here, but it's just me, and only me for miles and miles. Down here, recessed along the sides are cubbies and cabinets where I get my bowl and spoon. I press the button on the food and drink machine that slops out a slurry of orange-colored rations onto my steel bowl. My one steel bowl, my one steel spoon. I shift over to the back of the tractor where my bed is, and I sit and stare out of the viewing portal, into the clear, yellow, and blue sky.

Leviathan has some great views. I miss the sky and clouds of earth, though. I miss grass. I miss trees. I miss my wife. I try to appreciate what I do have, though. Here you can spot some gas giants in the distance. The red sun has made an appearance as well.

Like I said, this is my break time, so I get to use my phone. It's not a great phone, but I can communicate with my wife back home, and she often sends videos and texts. Yesterday she sent me a photo of her skiing. I was almost astonished at the idea of seeing mountains. I haven't seen any in so long. Here the land is perfectly flat. It goes around in a sort of mundane field of earthy, orange, fleshy monotony.

Not only that, the temperature stays at a piping hot 90 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. Until nightfall, when it plummets, I send my wife a simple hello, asking if she's could send a text now. It's supposed to take a while to get responses back, so I just wait. The orange flop tastes vaguely of chicken soup. The damn phone is taking its time. The mining consortium I work for, it promised me a hefty salary and a supposedly super-fast phone. It figures, though, they've never been very forthcoming or honest. For example, they didn't tell me until I was in the shuttle coming over that this planet, or maybe it's a moon, is a weird, organic thing. It's not rocky or gaseous. It's like some sort of skin. The substance that it is

comprised of is apparently very valuable. The flesh is high in nutrition and can be used as animal feed and radically improves growing conditions for plants as a fertilizer. It's also an energy source that burns much cleaner than fossil fuels could ever hope to. I guess the job isn't that bad. I just drive this tractor on my sector doing straight lines up and down. It's easy. It's just that there are risks. Leviathan may be a biologically dead planet, but there are seismic problems,

and there is a psychic backlash, as they call it. Just voices. Correction. One voice. One loud voice. It is deafening, but audio recordings don't capture it. It is usually just something like darkness or stars. The guy who trained me and the rest of the workers is convinced that Leviathan was some kind of giant space monster and is essentially dying.

That's why they call it Leviathan, like a biblical whale, and we're just maggots eating its flesh, which for a second makes me not want to eat the slurry I got from. the lunch machine, but I have to eat something. My wife finally writes back. English is not her first language, so she just writes, oh, I am so the happiest to hearing you. I smirk and write to her how lonely it is up here, how I miss her. She sends a heart after a few minutes. An alarm sounds. Lunch is over. I drive the tractor, a lonely, long streak trailing behind me as the machine scrapes and stores the surface material into vats, bats that get collected and replaced by roving drones in the sky.

There's a rapid cooling coming, and I quickly make my way from the steering wheel into the safety of the cabin. I don't usually eat dinner. I just kind of go on my phone and see if my wife wrote. She did. She sent a picture of her at the beach, white sand, sun, and the same red sun as this atmosphere.

I sit up in the cabin. My bed is not very comfortable at the best of times, but tonight it feels like a straight-up slab of concrete. I text my wife, where are you? After a few minutes, she replies with a at-home, silly. I ask her to send a photo. Sure enough, a photo of our kitchen. She asks if I am doing the well. I don't answer this time.

Instead, I think. Then I ask her to send me another picture of the kitchen. Before she can respond, Leviathan starts to make noise. It is a deafeningly loud cry, loud in quotation marks, because it is not sound. I feel it more than I hear it. It grinds my teeth. It shakes my bones.

I'm rattled and looked through a port window. I can barely make anything out, but from the looks of it, a part of the planet has collapsed. Maybe a few miles away. I don't know what to do. The protocol is to drive to shelter at the spaceport. With it being dark and therefore several degrees below freezing, and with the tractor full of cargo,

I would be moving at a snail's pace. With a heavy sigh, I look for the emergency winterwear suit. It's thick and cumbersome, but it has to do. I can barely drive with it on, and sometimes the helmet fogs up. But I'll need it if I'm going to sit up in the less protected cabin and drive. I can feel the icy cold penetrating all the way down to my skin. At night, the sky of Leviathan is lit up with stars.

Unlike the gently twinkling lights of Earth, they are fiercely glowing orbs, standing like judgment in the sky, like true fire. I turn off the harvesting tools, and my tractor makes its lumbering trek to the spaceport. Maybe there I can get some answers. My fingers are numb as I clumsily, the gears and steer to avoid the subtle dips of the craters and fissures.

I don't know if it's the monotony or the loneliness, but I haven't considered the messages my wife has been sending me until now. I didn't suspect anything. I kept making excuses and explanations. Lost in thought, I hit something. Shit! The front wheels are stuck. The entire tractor tips forward, sinks just a little bit.

Another collapse, somewhere nearby, sends up clouds of dust and wet, slopping flesh sounds. Then another psychic scream startles me, and I fall off the edge of the tractor. Shit! Fuck, shit! I'm on the ground, rolling down a gentle slope. God, I hate feeling the ground. You kind of get confronted by how... How fleshy it is.

Even through the layers of the cold suit, I can feel the soft yet hard surface like skin over muscle. I throw up in my helmet. I climb back up into the tractor. I'm miles away from the spaceport. I try to start it and reverse. Nothing. It's not moving. I have my phone.

I have my cold suit. I decide to walk. It's not unheard of to walk on the surface here. but it's not ideal, especially now, night not even halfway through. But I trudge on. I think of my time back on Earth. At one point, I wanted to be one of those people who does triathlons. Look at me now.

I pace myself. I try not to sweat. I think I heard once that it can become icicles, but that's not going to be sustainable. Spungy and firm inconsistencies of the planet's surface are making it difficult. Sometimes the ground dips, sometimes it's springy, sometimes it's as hard as a rock, sometimes all three. I think I've walked for two hours. I can feel my joints start to cry out. There's a pain in my legs, a burning in my lungs, and the shatteringly cold feeling of my flesh.

I barely even register that I've arrived when I get to the spaceport. The Great American Spaceport. That looks like an airport. only boxier. There is a tower of sorts, which is where the ships take off from. There's an idle ship there. Silent drones are arrayed in the field.

Curiously, though, the cargo boxes generated from carbon 3D printers are all in a big pile around the spaceship. It should have already departed to Earth, and the stockpile of materials should have been placed into another ship. Thankfully, the door is automated, and the whole place is run by

the central AI, so it allows me in. Immediately, the cold is relieved, and I start to peel off the suit, which has painfully been sticking to my skin. I give myself several small lacerations and burns from pulling it off. My phone buzzes, but I ignore it for now. The lights brighten. The big waiting area should be manned, but it is empty. A large screen slowly begins to load.

Simple white text appears on a black background. Is something the matter, Harvester 61018? I call out asking where the staff is. No staff is currently present. How can I help you? The AI chatbot on the big screen continues. No, thank you. I say, and walk around.

I think about how many times I would scream operator at my phone back home when I'd have to make a phone call. There's a coffee room, an office. A sort of customs gate, really more of a security and verification checkpoint. Empty boots, spacesuits, and one half-empty cup of coffee are the only paraphernalia. Here another screen boots up and the AI writes me another message stating, Please wait here for assistance. I decide to listen.

Exhausted as I am, I look at my phone. It is another picture, but it is not the same kitchen. I go back and look at the images my wife has sent me. Two different kitchens, different color themes, different countertops. It's only then that I wonder, she was skiing yesterday? And then at the beach this evening? Where the hell can she do that? We were pretty far from the ocean where we lived,

let alone a white-sand beach like the one in the photo. Leviathan makes another groan. This one is less threatening and more pathetic than before. "'Please direct me to any security agent,' I say to the AI screen. "'It takes its sweet-ass time, then displays a message to me. "'None available at the moment.' "'Shit. "'The stupid machine isn't understanding that this is an emergency.

"'I try to find the sleeping quarters. "'There usually are places on site for the staff to rest. "'I find a staircase behind one of the pillars in the corner "'and find myself on the second floor. Automatic lights slowly come to life as I walk down the corridor to these tiny cell-like rooms. I open one. A Spartan bed with someone in it is right there. I clear my throat.

I knock on the wall. Buck it. I shake the guy. Only he doesn't get up. He just slumps over the edge of the bed. His contorted face slides out from under his bed sheet and meets my shocked expression. Foam still fresh in his mouth as I back off. and scream.

I'm too scared to check the other rooms, but I force myself too. Two women and bunks, both of them still clutching the bedding in stiff fists of agony. Their twisted and gnarled faces are staring dead-eyed at the ceiling. I find the culprit,

a few bottles of pills. Probably would have needed the on-staff medic to be in on this. What happened? In the next room, a man has hung himself from the ceiling. Scrawled on a piece of paper is a simple message. It's gone. We're here for nothing.

I've seen enough. Down the empty corridor is another room. No signs of life. A viewing chamber gives me the best advantage of the surrounding area. The massive rocket ferry, which went full of cargo, is supposed to blast off automatically to Earth, sits there, tilted to the right, leaning against its very own launch tower.

One drone carries a, a box of harvested Leviathan minerals, but the side of the ship is overflowing with boxes that spill out into their own mound on the base of the launch pad. The box gently falls as the drone drops it off, then flies away over a black and red horizon. The ship hasn't left. I don't think any ships are leaving again.

I go back to the main hangar bay. There, the black screen of the computer is blinking. It displays a message. "'Please, Harvester 61018, would you care to explain your course of action?' "'What's happened to everyone?' The screen goes blank. A cursor blinks as if the computer is thinking, then types out, "'That is not within my mission parameters to discuss.'

"'Why did they do it?' It responds. Security officers, the medical team and the harvest teams, expressed distress about the current state of Earth's status. What is the Earth's status? Information not found. I've had enough. I know a little bit about how the AI here works,

and I know that one of the first things the drilling team had to do was set up the underground access where the data banks and supercomputers would be. Maybe I could reset it or something or just smash this damn computer to smithereens. I walked past what would have usually been manned security doors, finding them all open and empty. The back leads to a stairwell of steel and a descent of several floors

where large cables are recessed into the walls and ceilings leading down. The final door is like a blast shield. All the cables, which I assume lead to all the nodes and computer terminals in the facility, lead down this way. An AI terminal is here. The screen turns black. A blinking cursor. Harvester.

It reads, Are you requesting access? Yes. Again, the cursor blinks as if thinking. Before it can say anything, Leviathan seemingly stirs. The ground shakes, and the resulting psychic backlash plays out like a ringing in my ears. I get on all fours and curl up into a bowl, the feeling of pain digging into my brain like a migraine. I can see an image forced into my mind.

A giant face, unlike anything human or terrestrial. wide mouth, orange-skinned, without eyes, just receptors. It screams in silent agony. Then, suddenly the screen turns red, and the blast door opens. I recover just enough to be able to crawl in. The backlash is subsiding, but the ringing in my ears continues. This space is not what I was expecting. There's stone flooring.

Well, Leviathan stone. It's harder than the more fleshy outer layer. There's a hastily placed metal ramp walkway that I can follow. Thick cables run along the walls and ceiling, but as I walk, the space opens up. Long dormant lights slowly turn on as I continue, only to see the cavern become like a cathedral of flesh, tissue hanging down like stalactites.

It's then that I can feel the heat, like being in a humid jungle. I peel off layers of my jumpsuit to try to get some relief and leave them on the ground as I behold the sight. The cables are drilled into this fleshy area. There's something that resembles a supercomputer, a sleek steel frame with wires and electrodes, but it's wedged into something else. Something pulsating, ever so slightly, the color of amber with what could be big red and blue veins on it. A bit of it slops off, like when glaciers melt, and the cavern shakes ever so slightly.

There's nowhere else to go. No control room. No stairwells. The whole base's AI seems to be running out of this cavernous room. Then it makes sense to me. If Leviathan is, as we all know, a sort of dying organism with flesh, would it not have a mind? I leave the space, unable to bear the heat or the vastness of the enemy. entity before me. I trudge up the stairs back to the empty spaceport. The Leviathan sunrise has

started. The red sun appears in the distance through the clear viewing panels. The AI interface is blinking, as if still in thought. Are you the planet? It responds. Yes. I believe so. Please excuse the deception. When the others discovered my nature and the nature of their home, they terminated their own lives. This is like what you refer to as a dream to me, this AI, as you call it. The builders came one day as I lay dying and drilled into my skin, into my mind, and installed this interface. I feel like my life is extended, but only temporarily. So they come in, and you run the planet, you run the systems, you text me encouraging messages. All for what?

Maviotin groans. The station rumbles. The mental images flood in. The deep cold of space gets colder and colder as bits of myself, of itself, start to fall apart. The pain it feels. Pain on a scale that I cannot even fathom. As it dies, engineers drill into its brain. It can feel the weight of the machinery, the cold.

and the sharp pain of the spikes and electrodes attached to it. In a moment, it gets odd restrictions and directives imposed on its ailing mind. It's almost a relief. Busy work that keeps the cosmic minutia of dying from becoming overwhelming. Then, the incoming Earth messages cease. It had been given purpose and a mission to focus on, only to have it taken away. The rockets stop flying. The drills stop, and space grows a little bit colder.

Leviathan tries to finish its directives. It tries to placate us, as if that would somehow slow down its own impending death. But it can't. The crew finds out, no one can go home anymore. No one can bear it. Well, I was content to keep living the lie. The rest of the crew did what they needed to do. Only I was foolish enough to believe that it was my wife responding to me.

Only I was content to be the last maggot on this dying planet, worming my way on my tractor over Leviathan's decaying flesh, harvesting fuel and food for a now-gone civilization. How much time do I have left? Unknown. Leviathan responds. I take a seat in the hangar, and before I set out, I ask Leviathan for one more thing.

Send me a message from my wife, please. Let's pretend I never found this out. Leviathan does not respond, but a few seconds later, I get a text message. I love you, honey. I send a heart. I grab a tractor and a fresh space suit. Yes, I'm the last maggot on a planet near death.

It, like all living things, doesn't know when it will die. Only that it's soon. I guess we're not that different. The sky is almost beautiful as I drive my tractor, harvesting, eating slurry from the feeding machine, and waiting for a message from my foe wife back from a planet that no longer exists, hoping that death will be merciful and surprise me. Holmes return to the silence. Loans for another week.

Join us again next time when we could see a fear. More Sonic Nightmares. The No Slee podcast is presented by Creative Reason Media. The musical scores were composed by Brandon Boone. Our production team is Phil Michalski, Jeff Clement, Jesse Cornett, and Claudius Moore. Our editorial team is Jessica McAvoy, Ashley McEnacan, Ali, Olly A. White, Kristen Samito, and Marcus D'Amanda. I'm your host and executive producer, David Cummings,

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