S23 Ep6: NoSleep Podcast S23E06

WNSP You're joining us for the darkness of the night. WNSP's overnight programming. DC with you on this moonless night. Things feel a little quiet out there tonight in Cryptid Valley. I haven't heard many reports of sightings recently. I wonder if the cryptids are taking a bit of a summer vacation of their own. Maybe they're traveling, like to Ohio. Oh come on, some people like to vacation in Ohio. It brings to mind a buddy of mine who used to live in Loveland, Ohio. Now my friend hates frogs, really doesn't want to be around them. I've never asked if it's because of the Loveland Frogman. That's a cryptid reported being seen in Loveland. Descriptions of the creature vary, but it's generally said to be a bipedal frog or lizard standing around four feet tall. The first sighting was reported in 1955, and the legend was reignited in 1972, when a police officer reported seeing a similar creature. Despite the sightings, no physical evidence has been found. I suppose if I saw something like that, I'd hate frogs as much as my friend does. I hope your encounter with any amphibians tonight are only in the tadpole stage. Now let's hop on over to our regular segment here on the darkness of the night, an episode of the No Sleep Podcast. A rustle of the leaves, a fleeting movement at the edge of your vision. How often have you walked a forest trail at dusk, only to feel the unmistakable sensation that something unseen is watching you? For centuries, humans have populated the darkness with creatures of legend, whose existence remains unproven, yet whose presence is undeniable in the whispered tales of those who dare venture too deep into the wild. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast. Welcome to the No Sleep Podcast. I am your host, David Cummings. If you'll allow me, I'd like to give you my two cents about change. Get it? Two cents? Two pennies? Change? Oh, come on, that's a good joke. And this is a comedy podcast, after all. Oh, no, no, you're not here for laughs. You're here for chills and scares. I'll bet if this show changed from horror to comedy, a lot of you would stop listening, because that kind of change isn't welcome. A lot of smart people have been inspired to speak about the concept of change, quotes like, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or how about, there is nothing so stable as change? Or consider this, the world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress. We know change is inevitable. Change often brings about new and positive things, but human nature dictates that we don't often really want to experience it. Ever find a great place to live, and then some new development starts building nearby, ruining the vibe of the place? Ever find an amazing restaurant, only to have it change its menu to food you don't like? Ever been in a loving relationship with a person who changes and becomes a person you can no longer love? All of those situations might be positive for the others involved, but they're forcing you to change. And I get it if you don't want to experience that. In the world of horror, change is a fundamental aspect of unsettling and disturbing tales. Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde, Reagan McNeil changes from a sweet little girl into a demonic entity in need of an exorcist. Aliens invade and people are changed because of those body snatchers. These stories are disturbing because they're so relatable. We want the people in our lives to be stable and even a bit predictable. Throw that normality out of whack and, well, it makes for great content for horror storytelling podcasts. So we're not joking around. Any humor we offer is in service of horror. And I can assure you, that's not going to change. Now, tune in, turn on and brace yourself for our sleepless tales. In our first tale, we meet a couple who are struggling a bit. The husband is actually hoping his wife would change a little, improve her mood, become a more pleasant person. He knows there are medicines that can help her. But in this tale, shared with us by author M. N. Wiggins, when the man surreptitiously decides to treat his wife with a new drug, the changes he sees in her are, let's just say, unexpected. Performing this tale are Peter Lewis and Kristen De Macurio. So don't give up on your wedding vows so easily. After all, you did promise, for better or for worse. I rolled my eyes as I washed the blood-soaked clothes in bleach. At least they were dark colors. The wearing of white had been abandoned months ago. I stretched my back. I wasn't a kid anymore. I still felt the two hours that I'd scrubbed blood and remains off the front of our electric vehicle yesterday. I wasn't looking forward to scrubbing it again today, but stepping into the garage, I found the car pristine. Hun? What happened last night? The only response I heard was a groan from our bedroom. Jenny lay wrapped in the bedsheet. Her head turned from the morning light. I poked my head in. Hun, the car spotless. Jenny groaned again and pulled the sheet over her head. Hun, I don't feel so good. I whinched at the smell wafting my way. Who did you eat last night? She looked at me sheepishly. You're gonna be one short at poker night. My eyes whitened. Ron? Jenny cocked her head. Are you kidding? Ron eats pistachios all day. You know I have a tree nut allergy. It was herb. You ate herb? All of him? She put a hand on her stomach. I know, but he was like a big bag of chips. You can't quit after just one. But her weight like 250, he never got off the couch. She nodded. Which is where I found him. No stocking required. He was like tap and go for coffee. Her eyes narrowed. Don't be judgy. I've been eating nothing but night joggers for the past two weeks to lower my cholesterol. But waking up with that taste of granola and wheat germ completely sucks. I practically have to gargle tequila to get rid of it. There's only so much a woman can take, Stan. She smiled. Last night was my cheat day. Doesn't hurt to binge on something greasy every once in a while. Sweetheart, you can't keep eating our friends. Was he that great a friend, Stan? Kind of, yeah. Herb hasn't returned to our lawnmower in like three months. And still his lawn looks like crap. You could wallpaper a room with all the HOA letters he's gotten. That's not an edible offense. Well, it is in my book. She rubbed her belly. I'm going to need some prune juice. Maybe I'll go to the gym this morning. See if I can get things moving. Know what I mean? She smacked her lips. Ew. I might need some tequila. She belched. What did that guy live on gas station burritos? I kissed her and dressed for work. I held off mentioning that I might have a viable cure. False hope could send her spiraling back into the gloom and doom she'd once suffered. On the other hand, if I cured her, it would most certainly return anyway. Six months ago, we were in a bad place. No one had ever accused Jenny of being bubbly. She'd complained even when things were going her way. But over the years, her moods had darkened. She'd become angry and dissatisfied with everything from our house to her job or siblings, my parents, the cost of milk. You name it. Worst of all, she'd pivoted away from her dream of starting a family. She had also recognized the change. And together we'd sought everything the medical establishment had to offer. Nothing helped. But I wasn't giving up. I'm a pharmacologist by trade and my research focused on mood disorders. Maybe that's why I was so attracted to Jenny when we first met. I joined a pharmaceutical company in the hopes of developing treatments, but the administration had steered me down an alternate, morally questionable pathway. Recreational mood enhancers for the general public. Something to compete with the THC dispensaries. My team's hard work had produced a compound that stimulated endorphin release, but it still needed two years of testing before it could be put on the market. Jenny needed something now. She liked strawberry smoothies and I'd brought her one home every day for two weeks mixed with one extra ingredient. But it turned out that in addition to releasing feel good endorphins, the drug also camped out in the lateral hypothalamus, the brain's location for appetite. And a very particular one. Okay, fine. You know, in hindsight, perhaps the compound needed a little refinement before I secretly drugged my wife and admittedly when I discovered her, feasting on a big box delivery guy that she'd lured into her living room. I conceded that the FDA's stance on testing protocols, you know, might have a point. But I will say her mood, it did improve. You know, when she pulled her head out of his chest cavity to look up at me, I saw an adulterated joy in her eyes and my heart melted. However, we had to blow our savings to replace that couch and the carpeting. So much for that Caribbean cruise in the fall. I suspected that the dietary urges would fade once the drug cleared her system. They did not. But then all drugs have inconvenient side effects. This one simply had nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, blurry vision and possible neighbor loss as a touch of cannibalism can occur. So I thought about the cure this morning as I drove to work feeling confident in the formula. But then something occurred to me. Now Jenny hadn't asked to be cured, not once. But people couldn't keep disappearing around our neighborhood. That was out of the question. Sooner or later there'd be rumors and our home value would drop. On the other hand, Jenny has never seemed happier. Maybe that's why the cure was still locked in my desk three weeks after I'd finished it. I mean besides, how would I administer it? Another smoothie would look suspicious and now she refuses to eat anything that doesn't have a social security number. So I workshopped the dilemma in my head as I drove home that evening. If she does miss the taste of sweet and sour chicken, she's mentioned that more than once. It is decided then that giving her the cure is the right thing. But what if she finds out? What will she do? I mean maybe she already suspects. My eyes widened. Crap. She's fed me sweet and sour chicken like four times this week. With the cure in my pocket, I quietly opened our front door and slipped over to the liquor cabinet. I swirled the bottle to mix it in and screwed the cap back on with a smile. A woman does like her tequila. Hun, I'm home. Jenny rushed into the living room and bear hugged me. I felt her smell my neck as she kissed it. Honey, I'm pregnant. Oh shit. As a parent, there is no change you want to see more than your child being relieved of any and all pain they might experience. Whether a skinned knee, a broken limb, or worse, the ability to heal your child would be the greatest gift of all. And in this tale, shared with us by author Cassandra Doukis, we meet a mother with just such a gift, but her abilities would be considered much more serious than just a band-aid solution. Performing this tale are Marie Westbrook, Sarah Thomas, Mary Murphy, and Matthew Bradford. So if you're hurt, try to find someone loving who will kiss it better. On the first day of summer vacation, my daughter, Katie, came home with the skin of her right knees scraped pink and dotted with blood and bits of gravel. Mrs. Harrison from next door held Katie's shoulder as she shuffled, supporting herself on her good leg, tears streaming down her dusty cheeks. Afternoon, Beth, she tumbled down the dirt pile again. Mrs. Harrison gestured to the empty lot at the end of the street that Katie and the other neighborhood kids had taken to treating as their own personal playground. Katie released my care sniffle piteously. Oh, Katie. I eyed her knee. It wasn't too bad. Go to the bathroom. I'll be right there. Thank you, Mrs. Harrison. The older woman smiled. It's no trouble. She lowered her voice and leaned closer. She smelled a lavender and arthritis cream. Have you heard anything about Tommy Blunt? There's been nothing on the news, but I thought perhaps he would know more. He's a friend of Katie's, isn't he? Tommy and Katie had a falling out the week before. They'd been playing in the creek and Tommy had pushed Katie off the rocks, but Mrs. Harrison didn't need to know that. They are very close, I said, taking care to keep my face still. Such a shame. I hope they find him soon. Mrs. Harrison padded my arm. I hope so too. Keep your eye on Katie. Anyway, I should let you. I waved at the retreating Mrs. Harrison, closed the front door and went to the bathroom to join Katie. She was seated on the lip of the sink, waiting patiently. A damp cloth pressed against her knee. Kiss it better, mom. She uncovered the scrape, still marred by dirt. I bent over and pressed my lips against the broken skin, which was hot against my mouth. My own knee throbbed. All better. Thank you, mama. Katie tossed the cloth into the sink. She ran right back out the front door and didn't bother closing it behind her. I didn't mind. Her thanks were a balm. That was all that I needed. The knowledge that my kiss could make my daughter feel better. As the days passed and the brightness of June turned into the sweltering heat of July, Katie collected a laundry list of accidents. She stumbled through a cluster of poison oak. She ran into a wall and knocked out a tooth. She fell off the trampoline and sprained her ankle. She flipped over the handlebars of her bike and broke her collarbone. Almost every day, Katie ended up with some cut or bruise, a testament to a rambunctious childhood summer. And every time, I would kiss it better. What do you keep in your medicine cabinet? This was after Mrs. Harrison had brought Katie home for the third time. I have never known a child to heal more quickly than Katie. I laughed as though it was a joke. Good genes, I guess. But beneath the laughter, I was growing concerned. Mrs. Harrison was too curious for comfort. The first week of August, Katie fell out of a tree and broke her arm. A fragment of bone pressed up under her skin and above her wrist, and the whole limb was crooked and bruised. Yet again, Mrs. Harrison escorted Katie home, shaking her head in condemnation. She really should be more careful. She should, I agreed, and closed the door in the meddling old lady's face. I followed Katie into the bathroom. Kiss it better! It hurts! Kiss it better now! The door clicked close behind us, and I shoved down my exasperation. Of course I will, but really, Katie, you should be more careful. Katie threw herself onto the closed toilet seat and glowered at me. Why? I know you'll kiss it better. I'm sorry. Something uncomfortable tightened in my chest, but what other option did I have? Katie was my daughter. So I steeled myself and pressed my lips against the bruise that wrapped muddled purple around her wrist. I screamed as the bones in my wrist cracked. I'd done this hundreds of times, but the visceral pain of it never ceased to surprise me. I watched in horrified fascination as bruises bloomed like heliotrope under my skin. As my bones fractured, Katie healed, growing whole as my arm took on the injury. Thanks, Mom! Katie hopped off the toilet and skipped out the bathroom door. A moment later, the front door slammed closed. I gritted my teeth. My arm fucking hurt. I stumbled to my feet, cradling my useless arm and stepped across the hall and down the creaky stairs to the basement. It was unfinished. The walls lined with storage shelves stacked with cardboard boxes. The washer and dryer were set up under a small window set high in the wall, which allowed a narrow beam of dusty light into the dark space. I regularly swept the concrete floor, but it still managed to have a layer of grit that crunched softly under my feet as I crossed the room. In the corner was a low door. I kept it hidden by a small bookshelf, which I pushed aside with my undamaged arm. I bit my tongue to keep from crying out in pain. Once the door was exposed, I lowered myself to my knees and unlocked it using the key that I kept in my pocket at all times. I never knew when I might need it. The room behind the door stank of sweat and piss with a sweet undercurrent of rotting flesh. I opened my mouth to keep the scent from overpowering me. The space was full of silence, an uneasy quiet that screamed of someone trying desperately to stay still. Tommy, we're having chicken nuggets for lunch. Don't you like chicken nuggets? The pile of blankets in the corner of the small room started to move and with a wary shuffle he emerged. I stared into the back corner, but he insisted on coming into focus at the edges of my vision. A boy, far too skinny and bearing a summer's worth of untreated injuries. Nuggets? His voice was weak but hopeful. The corner remained dark. Yes, but I need to kiss you first. The pleasure on his face faded when he saw my arm. Please, please, no. It hurts. Please let me go home. It missed my mommy. I briefly remembered Katie's dad. How he cried and begged after then baby Katie had fallen off a wall he'd set her on as a joke. She'd broken her neck. He'd lived to regret that decision. For a few minutes anyway. Since then I haven't let anyone's tears aside from Katie's affect me. I'm her mother. I have my priorities. Mrs. Harrison will be taking your place soon and then you can leave. But Katie needs you now. Remember how she screamed at the creek and how you promised you would do anything to help get her better? I remember. Something on his cheek gleamed in the gloom. Then I leaned closer and it was gone. The black of his hair instead mingling with the void of the corner. He hadn't understood what had been asked of him. He just wanted to help his friend. But that wasn't my problem. For Katie. He turned his cheek to accept my kiss. In software development we talk about versioning. Like when a program goes from version 5.5 to version 6.0. It's a concept that's entered the vernacular. Like I've lost weight and got a new job. I'm Bob version 2.0. And normally that kind of change is positive. But in this tale, shared with us by author Gene Gallistel, we meet a woman who's in a relationship and she'd like to tell us about the changes, the versions her man has gone through. Performing this tale are Aaron Lillis and Atticus Jackson. So you might want to take notes as we learn about the five iterations of Brad. Things have been strange lately. Maybe that's the understatement of the year. Let's say things in my specific orbit have been coming back to life. Not alive per se, but reanimated. There's a crash in the next room and my cute and cuddly cat, George, who I affectionately call murder face because of his viciousness, runs off and hides. I love that fur kid, but he seriously would abandon his person at the first sign of trouble. This is the cat that once cornered a sitter in my basement and kept the poor woman trapped down there for a half hour, hissing and swiping closets every time she tried to use the steps. George can be a total dick at times. He's been on edge ever since last night because of what I have in the other room and I finally got him to sit with me on the couch. He was purring up a storm and I thought it was the perfect time for mommy to get a little wine drunk and stream something on Netflix when that crash happened. There goes again and that second thud forces me to realize that I have to deal with this. It's my mistake and I have to clean it up. These are the moments when I wish I had a man around the house, someone I could defer such things to. But the last one, Brad, didn't work out so well. Maybe this is all his fault. Now that's just me projecting. Brad and I were a couple for nearly seven years and lived together for most of that time, although that came with some stressors best explained as people's problems. You live with someone long enough to see them at their best and their worst and sometimes on the journey the person you end up with is a very different iteration from the one you started with. I sometimes think of Brad in terms of software versions. I'm a bit of a geek and geeks sometimes do that. So first there was Brad 1.0 aka Brad the Dreamer. This was the version of Brad I met in a dark and dank dance club. He loved dancing and seeing live shows. He was vibrant, spontaneous, love life. He broke a few laws. The night I met him, he told me he was an artist trying to become a magician so he could learn an ancient language, something he claimed the first men spoke and he intended to use said language to solve humanity's problems. My god. He was also high on ecstasy so that might explain some of his oddities. From the start he puzzled and amazed me and he seemed to have a glow about him the way an aura would shine a visible. Maybe that iteration of him possessed a primitive form of magic. I don't know but I was into him from the moment we met and went home with him that first night. The dreamer was intense, fluid and had a way of looking at you into your eyes and seeing you. He took my breath away even though his life was vastly different than mine. I would say I had a normal middle class progression through my first 30 years. Grade school, high school, a six year stint and somewhat prestigious state school that allowed for a semester abroad plus a few extra to make up for partying a bit too much during my 21st year. A business degree then into the corporate maw. The dreamer spent his days reading and writing in coffee shops. He liked poetry, detective novels and biographies of the great men of history. The dreamer lived below the poverty line even though he worked several part-time jobs first as a bus driver and the second as a dishwasher but he had no understanding of money. It came, it went, it seemed to be nothing to him. His focus was his dreams and ambitions and he had hundreds of them. We drove across the country with strangers, went to Burning Man when it was still cool, explored desert wastelands and made friends everywhere. He once told me he dreamed of wandering the globe and living the essence of wanderlust, of being a nomad without a place or a destination. We saw each other every night and every night was a different adventure. We were happy and that was that. Brad 2.0 aka Brad the tweener came next. This version of Brad was half in half out of the real world. This version of Brad decided he needed a career. The only thing he could settle on was bartending. I guess you could say he was trying to be responsible. He had been evicted from his apartment so he crashed with my roommate Kimmy and me and he stressed her the f**k out. She started a passive aggressive campaign to drive him out so he needed a job and money for his own place. After he landed a consistent gig he moved into a single room in a college frat house that offered rooms for rent monthly without a lease. I stayed with him a few nights to christen the new place. He had a twin mattress on the floor, two beat up old pillows, a CD clock radio that he used as an alarm clock and a few garbage bags full of clothes. One for clean, one for dirty. The place was disgusting, loud and smelly but Brad loved it. The tweener loved late nights and working with people, even those on the inebriated spectrum. This version of Brad was a social animal who expanded his friends network to almost everyone he knew in the industry. He gave that word industry almost a mythical quality when he talked about it. It was like you could open a Tolkien map of Middle Earth and find the village of industry somewhere between Rohan and Gondor. We went out a lot and still danced but less than before. We lived an active social life, one that surprised my coworkers when I told them about our adventures. They were all starting to couple up, marry, nest and procreate but that seemed to be the furthest thing from what I wanted to do. The tweener put on some weight because he drank more, worked out less than his previous iteration. He developed love handles, chubby cheeks and a pot belly but none of that mattered. We had fun and there were times when he would still take my breath away like when he asked me if I'd like to start looking for an apartment with him. I knew I loved him then and I was pretty sure he felt the same way although he only mouthed those words during sex. Brad 3.0 aka Brad the sloth came into being over time. Maybe his nesting instinct kicked in after we got that apartment. He was drinking beer daily then his waistline grew and his belly became more pronounced until he couldn't fit into his old pants. That was gradual but then I took him shopping and he looked depressed as he tried on clothes that I don't know shattered his self-image. His size 32 waist was the thing of the past along with much of his past self. That was how I knew I had a different iteration of him. He seemed hollowed out spiritually as if he had hung up those aspects of himself that were so attractive. Maybe he thought he was shelving the dreams for a while or putting them on hold. I know he didn't write or paint anymore and sometimes when he wasn't staring at his phone I'd catch him looking at old photos of us and there seemed to be a profound sadness in his eyes. This version of Brad also became addicted to his phone and social media. Have you ever googled Instagram addiction? It's a thing. The sloth doom-scrolled on Instagram endlessly until he found some of the darker corners of the Insta world and became enthralled with a series of influencers. There was seemingly one for every facet of Brad's Insta obsessions and he followed them almost living vicariously through their posted lives. I tried to understand the appeal but couldn't. I almost left this iteration of Brad the day he told me with a severe and straight face that he wanted to make a career change. Wow, I thought, be something more than a bartender? Fantastic. He was wearing a serious expression when he said he wanted to become a content creator. I laughed and the color drained out of his face. Something changed in him that day. It was probably me laughing that broke him out of the cocoon he'd been in. Maybe not. I've thought about it sometimes, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the interaction and wondering if I'd been supportive of his little dream. Would we still be together? I didn't even realize a change was in progress until a few weeks later when Brad 4.0 materialized. Brad 4.0 aka Brad the anomaly surprised me. We had the same schedule for years and Brad showed up early from work one night. He said he'd tired of working late shifts and swap schedules with one of the new kids working at the bar. He started to look better as well. He was drinking less and sleeping more. He'd also invested in a gym membership. I asked him if he was a pod person and he laughed it off. He started buying new, better clothes, flossing each evening and shaving every morning. Previously he'd shave about every two to three days when the stubble irritated him enough to take action. Another thing that surprised me was that he wasn't using his phone as much. He'd check it occasionally and sometimes comment on the weather or the news, but he wasn't fixated on the thing anymore. A few weeks after the anomaly manifested, we were sitting on the couch, sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching the latest episode of one of my favorite shows when Brad's phone dinged. This hadn't happened for a while so I thought maybe he'd reverted to some of the sloths old ways. What's blowing up on your phone? I paused the show and saw Brad check his phone. Is it another one of your Instagram troll-ups sharing a video and noting that there's a link in her bio where you can see Saucy your content? I uninstalled that app and deleted my profile. What? I picked up my phone, opened Instagram and searched for his profile. It was non-existent. I have to type an email. The anomaly got up from the couch and walked into the spare bedroom we used as a shared office. The sloth liked some of Instagram's darker corners. It's not just friends sharing photos, cat videos, gardening tips and updates on Russian war crimes being committed in Ukraine. The sloth kept up to date on all of those. He could doomscroll through that content until the algorithm governing that cesspool portion of the internet led him to his troll-ups. That's what the sloth called these bot-like anonymous accounts that guided all sorts of individuals from Instagram to a separate social media site. I'm sure you know its name and that it hosts Saucy your content for subscription price tiers. The sloth loved these Insta-troll-ups, especially their seemingly mundane videos where some cute young things starts what seems like a banal status update about her life, vacation or job, and then flashes an upskirt crotch shot five to ten seconds into the video before refocusing the camera back on herself and completing the status update. There was always a second graphic containing the words Lincoln Bio. I occasionally wondered if the sloth followed those breadcrumbs to their ultimate destination, mainly when he felt the need to show me those videos. Who does this? He would ask as I held up my hand to block a screen. Oh, that piece of shit, Mark Zuckerberg, can train an algorithm to radicalize a fragile mind or sell almost anything, but he can't train it to detect crotch shots in the center of mundane videos. I once saw a man wearing a shirt with Zook's face and the caption, This man ruined my life. I wanted to buy one for Brad and probably needed one for myself. Wait, I called after the anomaly as he ducked into the study. You're off Instagram? It took me to some dark places. Then he pointed to his phone. But I have to reply to this email. Okay. I said, feeling a little perplexed. It's sometimes nice when a partner can genuinely surprise you. George joined me on the couch, purring a storm, and we waited for our Brad to rejoin us. Who did you email? I asked as he sat back down. And HR coordinator? He sounded almost embarrassed. It was about a job I applied for. He had a smile on his face that seemed so foreign, like an old article of clothing that fit him perfectly, but he hadn't worn it in ages. Maybe it was just so long that I had seen him smile that I was taken aback by it when he did. I just stared at him for a minute. What? I glanced around the apartment. Is there a hidden camera somewhere and I'm secretly on a reboot of Ashton Kutcher's Pumped? Real funny. What job did you apply for? I playfully poked him in the side. You'll laugh. I won't. It's something in sales. Sales? See? He stood up and shook his head. You're making fun of me. I'm not making fun of you. This is also sudden, so I wanted to know the motivation. The anomaly then recounted the story of a saleswoman named Stephanie popping into his bar on a quiet afternoon. She's an account rep with one of the liquor distributors. Which one? Whichever one carries Jameson. She was looking for Leonard. Leonard was the degenerate bar manager who squandered most of his admin time before the bar was open carrying on affairs with his waitresses. I told her Leonard wasn't there. She said it was her last stop of the day, so she ordered a beer and we talked. About what? Nothing really. He was playing coy. We just shared some industry stories. Again, that word. And after she heard some of mine, she asked me if I was happy at the bar. I thought you were. The anomaly shook his head looking away. I love the industry. We see people and get to share in some of their best and worst moments. I'm not getting any younger. He paused. I gotta think about the future. My future. I've gotta get a 401k and some health benefits. I sat there in shock. Had he really thought these thoughts or were they someone else's words? In the entire time I've known Brad, every iteration of him, he'd only gone to a doctor once and that was because he gashed his palms so deep one evening that he needed stitches. Who was this man? My favorite moments with Brad were our little intimate ones. Not sex, just shared time and space. Spend a few years with someone and wonder how many times you'll share the bathroom sink to brush your teeth before bed. Catch a glimpse of your person undressing or share a shower or a bath. The anomaly surprised me again as we were getting ready for bed that night. He showed me a facial moisturizer he'd just bought at Walgreens. He said he'd gotten the idea from some gentleman's email he signed up for. I silently watched him in the mirror as he applied the moisturizer and wondered if a different iteration of Brad, maybe an interdimensional variant that forked somewhere in his past hadn't come to our dimension and kidnapped the anomaly and took his place. When Brad 5.0 aka Brad the moisturized or he of the moisturized skin and upward career mobility manifested, I knew we wouldn't be together much longer. Call that intuition or maybe he was waiting for the right time to end it. It was him that broke up with me. Can you believe that? When he finally got the muster to use his words, I was surprised by how relaxed he looked. He must have been carrying around our baggage for so long that it had weighed him down and without it, he seemed liberated and his skin glowed almost like in the olden days when I thought he possessed a bit magic. I was jealous, but what hurt the most was that he actually accused me of being obsessed with Instagram. I did a double take. What? You're always on that app. You're doing the same things you used to accuse me of. It's a substitute for you actually living life. I had to admit he had a point. I had fallen down several insta rabbit holes and followed them deeper and deeper as our relationship wilted. I work as an insurance underwriter. It's not a sexy job, but people always need insurance so there is always some trickle of work. I structure my days to maximize my ability to do a little of everything. My first 30 minutes in the office are reserved for emails and follow up phone calls. Then I have two hours provisioned for actual work and a solid half hour of phone time. That can sometimes fill up the space before lunch and then we usually have meetings, meetings that could have been emails, but our company is filled with passive aggressive assholes so we have meetings with our immediate team, weekly departmental meetings and a monthly all staff. After that, we're supposed to finish the day strong, but almost everyone has had the will to live sucked out of them. So we sit on our phones. That's modernity. Instagram obsessions. I have too many to count. Have you ever heard of the English poison garden? I found that on Instagram. It has its own page and a garden influencer curating content from the ever changing garden. The physical location and garden proper are fenced to protect wildlife and passersby because they contain something like a hundred different toxic and narcotic plants. There are dozens of videos and hours of content to lose yourself in. You can even go there and take guided tours. Think of that. I stumbled on to that while searching for ideas for a shade garden. Our apartment has a small fenced in backyard that gets only a pitiful amount of sunlight due to our landlord's plum tree, which he refuses to prune. I've asked him to trim it and he ignored the request. So with limited light, I thought shade garden. Our plot already has a healthy infestation of Belladonna. You can always identify Belladonna by its greenish purple vine and multicolored cluster of berries which range from green to cherry red. I knew it was poisonous, but it never delved into the plant's history. Roman women would make tinctures of Belladonna and water. The resulting solution, adequately mixed, would then be used as eyedrops and one drop in each eye would trigger the pupil to dilate as big as a dinner plate, which in ancient Roman times was considered a sexy thing. The Roman women would dilate their eyes before religious festivals and orgies. I read more and found a slew of native, shade loving and poisonous plants, all of which came from Instagram. I tried to tell Brad about my discoveries and told him that this is what the internet should be used for. This was near the end of our relationship. It's always hard to see the end from the inside, but an outside observer probably would have seen two people going through the motions. The morning kiss goodbye became the only affection and the whispered love you became a placeholder. Both of us were distracted. Brad, with his new job, and me by my increasing obsession with Mr. Zuckerberg's application and the poison plant influencers I was following. I played around with a garden planning app, made sketches of plant arrangements and started buying plants. I bought leafy sponge, milkweed, wild parsnip, water hemlock, poison ivy and ground ivy, and when my packages started to arrive, some were labeled poisonous and Brad said to me, I think you're obsessed. Brad and I officially split about four months after the moisturized materialized and when the end came, I didn't even fight for the relationship. The version of Brad I was with was too far removed from the one I fell for, but I had also evolved. I admitted to myself that Brad was right about a few things. I was obsessed with Instagram and had allowed Mr. Zuckerberg's algorithm to take me on a journey. It started with shade plants, then poisonous plants, the mysteries of herbology came next, which led me to witchcraft, both modern and ancient, and finally one further step into the abyss, necromancy. Don't you doom scroll when you have a broken heart? You wouldn't think dark corners exist on Instagram until the algorithm guides you step by step into the madness. I remember the first reels I watched with titles like Your First Five Spells, Sigil Magic Made Easy, Necromancy for Beginners, Raising the Undead, and Controlling a Thrall. I remember my first sigil. A sigil means tiny sign in Latin. I remember the witchy influencer with her perfectly straight black hair and almost see-through black dress explaining the origins of sigil magic, dating back to pre-Christian Western Europe, to the time of the Romans and Celts, to the time of the Druids. The essence of sigil magic was to focus on a word, intently focus, and associate that word with a person. And once the two were intertwined, you wrote the word on a scrap of paper using bold, capital letters stacked one on the other. For my first sigil, I chose the phrase rodent. The rodent was my former team lead. Following the pandemic, the company I work for hemmed and hawed about the best way to get the staff of underwriters working from home back into the office for productivity reasons. One of the corporate gimmicks was a company sanctioned happy hour each Thursday evening at an adjacent brew pub. Every employee got one beer on the company's dime and the environment fostered a generally positive attitude. However, some employees took the invitation to let their hair down to an extreme. One night, well Brad and I were still stitched together with only a few threads, I went to one of the Thursday night happy hours and had a few beers. The rest of my team was overindulging because they'd all finished their quarterly financials. I was the last one still working on my numbers and plan to take the work home that night almost as a distraction from engaging with Brad. I made an excuse to leave and returned to the office and the rodent followed me back. It was empty except for the night cleaning lady Rosalita. We shared a few pleasantries while I printed a few reports and gathered my things. I had gone to our copy room to grab my printouts when the rodent showed up. He was drunk and cornered me in the copy room and in his drunken wisdom thought exposing himself would be a way of showing affection. I laughed and shouted for Rosalita who appeared in the doorway and shouted, Deuce Meal between belts of laughter. The next morning I filed an HR report and took a sick day claiming emotional stress from the incident. Our company took surprisingly swift action. I accepted a five figure payout and a one month paid lead of absence which allowed me to take a little jawn to England to get a guided tour of the English poison garden. I had to sign an NDA and the rodent was shuffled to another team filled with post college bros who spent their days chasing financial markets and yoloing themselves into poverty. From management's perspective, the issue was swept under the rug. It was a nothing burger. After returning to the office, I heard several of the rodents yolo bros giggling as I passed their cubicle cluster. So I decided to set matters right. I stole a piece of the rodents inner office mail, a somewhat meaningless memo but one addressed to him. I crafted an appropriate rodent sigil on a scrap of olive green printer paper, folded it into an origami mouse, then paper clipped it to the rodents memo and sent it back to him via one of our mailroom thralls. I had to linger outside a second floor office to see the thrall hand deliver the memo. The rodent looked amused as he unfolded my little present, found my sigil, pondered it for a moment and then tossed it in the trash. He skimmed the attached memo, shredded it and returned to his conversation with one of his minions. I was on edge watching and thinking something would happen. Maybe a lightning bolt would strike the bastard down but nothing happened. I felt deflated and returned to my desk. Five minutes later, our whole office heard a blood curdling scream coming from the rodents cubicle cluster. Heads popped up over cubicle walls and eyes darted back and forth. Then we saw him, the rodent, with great red splotches on his hands and face, clawing or pawing at his eyes. Blind or nearly so, he pinballed against various office furniture, tripped over a chair here, crashed into a cube wall there, stumbled into our ricko color copier and fell into the boss's cute secretary carrying a tray of Starbucks. There was a horror to it yet I had to watch. The rodent seemed to be trying to get to the men's room but every time he opened his eyes he cried out. Five feet from the men's room he ran into an invisible wall. You've probably seen videos of people crashing into glass doorways they didn't notice. Either they crashed through or fall flat on their asses. The rodent crashed into nothingness, stood straight up as if dumbfounded. Then his body lurched hard to the right, crashed through the doorway to the parking garage stairwell and rolled down a flight of concrete steps. When the paramedics finally wheeled the rodent out to the waiting ambulance, he was loopy on some heavy painkillers and suffering from broken ribs, a compound fracture of his right ankle, a swollen and bruised face and a severe allergic reaction to his hands and eyes. I could have told the paramedics there that the rodent had been exposed to Poison Ivy but what fun would that have been? Let them find out for themselves and piece together that puzzle. I made a point of coating the interior of my origami mouse with poison ivy on the off chance my sigil magic failed but it did not. Hermology and sigil magic bitch. If I could do that to someone with my backyard wonders or use a sigil to kick someone down a flight of stairs with an imaginary boot, I wonder what else was possible. So I returned to Mr. Zuckerberg's app and allowed the algorithm to guide me to darker places, dark things that I adore so that I could discover much, much more. Brad's official reason for leaving me was that he said we'd grown apart and that I wasn't supportive of his life choices. The argument happened the week after I filed my HR complaint. He started the conversation by saying I need to speak my truth. I wanted to vomit. Yes, we'd grown apart. I could see the distance growing daily since the moisturized came into existence. Still, I also noticed Brad frequently coming home from work drunk and a little stoned and faintly smelling of another woman's perfume in the weeks before it was finally over. Stephanie, the woman who believed in him, who pushed him to be something more and promoted his CV to her higher ups. She took him under her wing after he'd been hired, took him on sales calls, and she also had a recreational marijuana habit. Brad had told me that he'd smoked with Stephanie in her car following his first sales call. She did this so often that she kept bottles of vizine in her glove box to chase off the red-eyed byproduct of her smoking. Two months after Brad and I split up, after my return from Europe and my little experimentation with Sigils, I broke into Stephanie's car in the parking lot behind her apartment building. The alarm blared when I threw a brick through the passenger side window, but I wasn't interested in stealing anything. I popped the passenger side door and swapped her bottle of vizine from the glove box for a solution that I cooked up, which contained the juice of a few Belladonna berries. Roman women dilated their pupils with tinctures made of one to one hundred solution of Belladonna in water. When mixed correctly, the solution could be used as eye drops. If mixed incorrectly, the solution could kill, as my eye drops did to Stephanie. Hold on, you pain in the ass! You might think of me as a cruel person. Well, I am an insurance underwriter. Think of that as an evil, dark superpower because my company is one of the largest insurers in the state and we handle policies for many corporations, including the liquor distributor Brad went to work with. I handled his policy when it was first processed and flagged his account to inform me if there were any changes, and I saw the day that he posted his change of address. A quick search of our database found one other employee sharing the same address. A woman named Stephanie. Tell me that some Celtic druid could have divined that knowledge faster than me with a few keystrokes on a database query. Stephanie didn't use the eye drops I left right away. Those were situational, and two days ago, Stephanie's situation called for them. She was on the expressway when it happened, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, returning to the office after her last sales call. Maybe she had smoked in the car and checked her eyes in the rear view, then she tilted her head back and put a drop or two into each eye. I wonder if the solution still had the slightest maroon hue. The drops triggered what appeared to onlookers to be an epileptic fit. The local news covered the story and even interviewed a few eyewitnesses. From their descriptions, Stephanie's body began violently convulsing, flailing almost. During one of those convulsions, she slammed on the gas and her car's engine roared like some ancient beast then jolted forward, rear-ended several vehicles. She was dead by the time the police and the paramedics got to her. That happened two days ago, and I didn't know it was her until the local news flashed her profile pic, the same one she prominently displayed on her LinkedIn page. But then a funny thing happened that I didn't anticipate. Stephanie's body disappeared from the morgue about an hour before her autopsy was scheduled. That made the lead story on the 10 o'clock news last night. It was a perfect follow-up piece regarding an accident covered the previous day. Car crash victim's body disappears from morgue, was the title screen that splashed behind the lead anchor, and immediately I buried my head in my hands. It serves me right for carving my necromancer's sigil into the back of the vizine bottle that did Stephanie in. I jumped onto Instagram and sure enough, found out that I'd created a thrall. Brad was a wreck after Stephanie's accident, more so even after the police showed up at their apartment and informed him that her body had disappeared. The police searched the place to ensure Brad hadn't stolen it for nefarious purposes. He texted me while they were there, our first communication in months. I replied immediately and told them to call me after they left. I was waiting for that call when I first sat down on the couch with George and tried to stream something. I gave up on those plans when Brad texted and then I saw his avatar in my phone flash. He was calling. His voice strained, slightly slurred, and I could tell he was fighting back the urge to ball. They implied that I'm a suspect. George probably, I replied, staring at the door that separated me from my guest. He's been jumping onto countertops lately and tipping things off. He had watched George while I was in Europe and I had asked him if he planned on getting the cat with Stephanie, but he said she was allergic. Her body will show up. The Emmy probably just mislabeled her on intake. She's probably sitting in a freezer and listed as a Jane Doe. That's horrible. It's happened before. When? We delayed a life insurance payment to a needy family of four because the father's death certificate had his name incorrectly spelled. Accidents happen in paperwork all the time. Paperwork? They lost her body. Brad, I'm trying to shed light on a difficult situation. They'll find her and then give her an autopsy and you can find out what happened. From what the reporters said, it sounded like she had a heart condition. Did she tell you anything about her medical history? No. Brad, get some rest. I don't think I can sleep in this apartment anymore. You're there now? Only because the police wanted to search the place. I think I saw something last night. What did you see? I think I saw her. There was a funny lady outside last night in the park across the street. She just stared in our apartment window but it didn't look like the stuff I knew. I mean, it did. She wore the same type of clothes but was ghostly white and had a huge gash across her forehead. Do you think she's become a ghost? Do you think she's haunting me? Brad. I checked into a hotel last night but I couldn't take it. I just thought I'd see her. I sighed. I knew he kept seeing her because after the 10 o'clock news, I raced over to their place, hunted down my thrall, stuffed her in the trunk of my car and then dragged her back to my apartment. Brad, do you want me to meet you at your place and do a walkthrough? We can ensure it's safe and I could sit with you and tell you can sleep at least. You do that? Yes, Brad. I still care about you, you dumb lug. Okay. He gave me the address I already knew and I told him I'd meet him in a half hour. I felt lighthearted when I hung up the phone. Hearing his voice, even in its current state, filled me with joy. And I thought about all those different iterations of Brad and wondered if there would be a Brad 6.0 in my future. Maybe one that gets torn apart by tragedy and reconstituted, made new and whole. Maybe Brad 6.0 could take some of the best aspects of his previous selves. Maybe he could have the dreamers whimsical nature and lust for life, obviously matured and refined by the anomaly and the moisturized, but still an iteration that I could love. Hang on! Stephanie, or the thing that had been Stephanie, was banging her head against the door to get my attention. She was worse than George when his food dishes get neglected. As soon as I opened the door, I saw the problem. The gash on her forehead had flapped open again. I had sealed it up last night with mortician's wax and was able to get her to calm by sitting her in front of a mirror. I got her seated again, applied another dollop of wax, and smoothed it into a uniform surface. The Necromancer influencer I follow on Instagram had little practical knowledge of dealing with thralls. So my time with Stephanie has been a learning experience. I first discovered that if your thrall is content and Stephanie seemed to be as soon as I smoothed out the gash on her forehead, they can perform basic tasks, almost a rudimentary machine. I've already had Stephanie clean the grout in my bathroom, scrub the toilet, vacuum, and wash my dishes. She's not very good at anything that requires precise hand-eye coordination. Otherwise, I would have set her up with a 24-7 data entry job. But when I put her in front of a keyboard, she slammed a clumsy fist into it. She likes sitting at my vanity best, staring at the face I've touched up for her. However, I wondered if she could see herself in the mirror through those milky white eyes. I'm going to see Brad. When she heard his name, her head twisted just a little. Maybe there was a bad dream in there somewhere. But that didn't matter. I gathered up my things as I watched Stephanie, my little odd Tomaton, sit in front of the vanity. Don't wait up. I closed the door, poured kibble into George's bowl, gave him a scratch, and headed off. As I drove over, my mind was awash with possibilities. So I played through tonight's step-by-step as a thought exercise. When I get there, I'll take Brad's keys and, with him following behind, walk through his apartment, turning on lights and checking their closets, and any spooky hiding spots. I'll show him there's nothing to be afraid of. After, I'll ask him for a drink. When we split, Brad was starting to distribute higher-end wines, and he'd had bottles of the stuff for samples or giveaways to restaurant and bar owners. He'd probably feel obliged to open a Pinot Noir or a Rosé, and we could share it. Then maybe a second bottle, so we were both a little drunk and our inhibitions muted. And then, perhaps, we could play some of the games we used to play when we first got together. I let my mind wander and linger on some of those hotter scenarios. I parked and saw Brad standing in front of his building. His head tilted back, staring at the sky. I shouted his name and waved while waiting for a few cars to pass. Brad! I ran across the street. When I reached him, he was doubling over and rubbing his eyes. Brad! Ah! What's wrong? I was putting eye drops in, but something's wrong with him. He held out the vizine bottle with my necromancer's sigil on it. My eyes really sting. Ah! Our tales may be over, but they are still out there. Be sure to join us next week so you can stay safe, stay secure, and stay sleepless. The No Sleeve podcast is presented by Creative Reason Media. The musical score was composed by Brandon Boone. Our production team is Phil Mykulski, Jeff Clement, Jesse Cornette, and Claudius Moore. Our editorial team is Jessica McAvoy, Ashley McEnally, Ollie A. White, and Kristen Semito. To discover how you can get even more sleepless horror stories from us, just visit sleepless.thenosleeppodcast.com to learn about the sleepless sanctuary. Add free extended episodes each week and lots of bonus content for the dark hours, all for one low monthly price. On behalf of everyone at the No Sleeve podcast, we thank you for joining us and seeking safety from the things that stalk us in the night. This audio program is copyright 2025 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.