by Tobias Wade
The sergeant on late night duty asked languidly. She was the kind of cop that made me want to try shoplifting just for fun. If I couldn’t outrun that 250 pound bag of marmalade, then I deserved to get caught. There was a little boy and a surly old lady waiting in line at the desk ahead of me, but I shoved past them. I don’t care what they lost, or whose neighbor has a dog that won’t stop barking. I’m willing to bet it doesn’t beat a Devil who tortures people.
“I need your help. I was kidnapped tonight.” She looked me up and down as though she were doing me a favor.
“It’s okay. Let her go ahead,” the little boy said. I didn’t take my eyes off the cop.
“Uh huh. Please tell me what happened,” she replied.
“It was after a date. I went home with this guy –”
“So you voluntarily left with him.” I know that face. That’s the ‘you’re-prettier-than-me-so-you-must-be-a-slut’ face.
“I did, but then he threw me into his basement. I might have broken something…” I was flustered. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say in this circumstance. Why did it feel like I was the one on trial? It was just now when I noticed the bruises were gone. My shirt was clean. The abrasions on my wrists from the handcuffs had vanished. There’s no way they could have healed that fast.
“And how did you escape?”
“Well he… let me go.” This isn’t right. This isn’t how this is supposed to go.
“So let me get this straight,” the cop replied, shifting her tremulous weight like she was apologizing to her chair. “You went home with a guy, and then you left. What exactly did he do wrong?”
“You don’t understand. He had three other people down there too. He’d been torturing them.” Torture. Now that’s a powerful word. I don’t know exactly what forces these guys to get out of their chair, but I’m pretty sure torture should do it. “There was a middle aged woman, a college girl, and this little boy…”
I finally had her attention. She sat upright and began taking notes. “What kind of torture?”
“Brutal stuff. The lady’s eyes were out, and there was a nail through the girl’s hands. I didn’t get a good look at the boy –”
“How old was he? Compared to the boy behind you in line.”
I looked back, and my heart skipped a beat in my chest. I hadn’t noticed because of my rush, but the boy standing behind me was the same one who was hunched over in the Devil’s basement. Clean – well fed – unharmed. But it was the same damn kid. The boy smirked.
“Ma’am? Was the boy you saw about his age?”
“Come with me,” the boy said. “The two of us are going to have a little chat.”
What else could I do? The police weren’t going to take me seriously. Not with two of the “kidnapped” people standing in their station, just fine. I don’t know what kind of sick game I found myself in, but when the boy walked out the door, I followed.
I’m not going to lie. I was getting close to tears at this point. It felt like when you were a child, trying to convince your mother of the monster under your bed. And as much as she tried to play along, you could tell she didn’t believe you. She was just dying to get back to sleep and leave you alone with it. The helpless frustration of KNOWING something is out there, but being utterly helpless to do anything about it.
The only difference is that my Devil is real, and he was going to kill those people if I couldn’t stop him.
The only question is: why had he let the little boy go? Or me for that matter?
The boy was walking quickly. He kept looking over his shoulder at me to make sure I was following – looking at me with wide terrified eyes. Now he was running. I chased him out of the station and straight across the street. A pickup screeched to a halt and blared its horn, and I dashed in front too. Screw you too, dude. I wasn’t about to let my only explanation get away from me.
The little boy ducked under the guard rail on the side of the road and began sprinting down the grassy slope on the other side. He actually looked like he was trying to get away from me now. Shit, if anyone saw us, it would look like I was the one trying to kidnap him. For once I was glad it was the middle of the night.
He slid down the rest of the hill and darted into a concrete drain pipe. I was finally gaining on him, and before he made it out the other side, I managed to wrap my arms around his waist and hold him still. It was dark in here. The streetlights didn’t reach this far down. All I could see was the terrified little boy and the concrete around us.
“Let go of me! Let me out!” he screamed.
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who told me to follow!”
“No I didn’t! Let me go.”
“Do you promise not to run away?”
“How could I? The door is locked, so let me go.”
The door? What door? I let him go and he collapsed to the ground. He crawled over to the wall and pressed himself there, glaring fierce little daggers at me.
“Tell me how you got out,” I demanded. I took a step toward him, but stopped when he crawled farther along the wall. He must be traumatized after what he went through tonight. I shouldn’t try to push him.
“I was just trying to get home. I’ve never been here before!”
He buried his head in his arms, sobbing. I knelt down and took another step forward, trying to appear as least threatening as possible.
“Leave him alone, you brute!” A woman’s voice. Someone was here? I jumped backwards and my back rammed into something. I flailed in the air to keep my balance and hit a switch with my hand. A light turned on. Who would put a light in a drain pipe?
But I wasn’t in the drain pipe. I was back in the basement. The concrete walls – the boy cowering in the corner, the woman with the bloody eyes standing over him. Even my date from earlier tonight was here, only now his eyes were hollow and weary, his skin gaunt and tight. It looked like he had been down here for a long, long time. The only one I didn’t see was the college girl.
“Okay – what the Hell is going on?” My whole body was starting to shake. The way they were all looking at me, it was like they thought I was the Devil. But I was a victim too! Why didn’t they see it?
“Weren’t we enough for you?” the woman asked. “Why did you have to bring a little boy?”
“The boy was already here! He was here before me!” I screamed. I must seem even more like a monster for screaming, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Don’t let her hurt me,” the boy cried.
“I didn’t – I didn’t do any of this. It was him!” I pointed at the man.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said, winking. This was all still a game to him. “The boy wasn’t here until you brought him. I just gave you a glimpse of your future.”
“But the other girl my age –”
There was no time to finish my question. He as on top of me now, pinning me to the ground. He pressed my face into the concrete and put his knee in the center of my back. I screamed as he pulled my arms behind me – then the searing pain in my hands. I couldn’t see what was going on, but it was easy enough to imagine the nail sealing them together. I had already seen what was going to happen, I just didn’t know it would be happening to me.
I got out three more times since then. The first time he let me go – I was free for about an hour. I hitch-hiked and drove as far from town as I could get. It wasn’t until we stopped that I realized my driver was wearing a mask – that he was the same Devil I met on Tinder. We were back at his house, and he dragged me back down into the basement.
The second time I escaped while he was sleeping. The door was unlocked – which seemed too easy to be real. I was right. I went to the hospital to get the nail out of my hands. I told them not to put me under, but they insisted on using anesthesia during the surgery. When I woke up, I was back in the basement. The nail was gone, but it looked like it was roughly pulled and I didn’t have any bandages, so I’m not sure if I ever really made it
outside.
This time I stayed in the house. I went upstairs and found a phone and a computer. I tried calling the police again, but the line didn’t go through. Now that the nail is out, I’m able to write this to have some record of what is going on. I don’t know if this is real or not, but I want to have something I can check to see if I ever got out of that room at all. I don’t know exactly where I am – somewhere in the Houston suburbs. He’s going to come for me again soon, and I’m going to wake up back in the basement.
He says he’ll let me out again if I return with more people, but I know I’ll only end up back here with them. Right now I’m strong enough to resist, but sooner or later I’m going to break and do what he says. I don’t know how to warn you, but I just want you to know – if you meet someone online and he seems too good to be true, then he probably is.
Dreaming Without Sleep
Humans don’t have a physiological need to sleep. Over time, chemical levels of Adenosine build up which cause the sleepy feeling, but that is simply a trigger designed to force our bodies to rest. Some scientists have theorized that this is an evolutionary mechanism intended to prevent us from wasting unnecessary energy while keeping us hidden during the night. Well there isn’t any shortage of calories to consume, and there’s nothing going to eat me in the night, so as far as I’m concerned, sleep is just an antiquated fetter which humans should leave behind.
We don’t need sleep to live, but we cannot survive without dreaming. And if you stay awake for long enough, you’ll start to dream even while awake. The more you try to fight those dreams, the more real they will become. Pretty soon, you can’t tell which is the dream and which is real, or whether there is a difference at all. That’s the story I told the police, and my attorney, and it’s the story I’m sticking with now.
It started when I read an article in my psychology class about this Vietnamese insomniac named Thái Ngọc who hasn’t slept in 43 years. It said he had some kind of fever, and then never felt the urge to sleep again. Even working full time, it’s like he has a vacation every night.
I don’t know about you, but for a stressed out college student always trying to cram for the latest test, that sounded like a lifesaver. I’m paying my own way through college with a work study program, and trying to maintain a social life in the half-hour break I have between class and work is absolutely impossible. I’m tired, and stressed, and missing out on what is supposed to be the best years of my life because I never have a free moment to be myself. If I could find a way to waste less time sleeping though, maybe things would get better.
I did some more reading and became obsessed with the idea. If we sleep for 8 hours and are awake 16, then eliminating sleep would be equivalent to adding around 40 years to my lifespan (assuming an 80 year life). I found some studies about a drug being tested on mice called Orexin-A which was supposed to completely eliminate the need for sleep. It hadn’t been approved for human trials yet, but there weren’t any negative side effects found in the mice. If anything, they seemed more active than ever. And the best part was, research for this drug was being done right at UCLA where I go to school!
Well I was able to find where the lab was easily enough, although I didn’t expect them to just hand me the chemicals. I tried to get an internship there, but they required at least twenty hours a week, and I couldn’t even begin to fit that into my schedule. I forgot about the whole thing until I overheard Ricky, one of the other kids in my psych class, mentioning that he got the internship.
Ricky was boasting about using the keys to sneak into the lab at night to get high off the anesthesia they used on rats. If he doesn’t sound like an idiot yet, then add a tank top that says “I party with sluts”, a hat with the “Obey” sticker, and a skateboard which he carries around to look cool but doesn’t know how to ride. You got the idea.
But that was fine with me, because it made it a simple matter to pretend to be his friend. All I had to do was turn my hat backward, make a couple dumb jokes about the blonde sitting in front, high-five him when she bent over, and voila. Suddenly we were bros. Future of American science right here.
It didn’t take many hints before he invited me into the lab. I found where the Orexin-A experiments were just by looking up the faculty directory in charge, and before my “buddy” finished coming down from huffing anesthesia, I had a whole backpack full of the little spray bottles of Orexin. It was nasally administrated, but I didn’t care as long as it worked.
And holy Hell – it worked alright. Twenty squirts up each nostril (seemed like a lot, but I controlled the dosage to 1mg/kg body weight, which was equivalent to the dose the mice were getting). I played Skyrim straight into the dawn. Okay, so it wasn’t quite self-actualization, but I hadn’t had any free time in a while, and it felt great to have the constant pressure off me. The night was so quiet, and by the early morning it felt like the entire world was made just for me. I didn’t even feel tired until the following night, and I just took another dose and all the weariness washed away. I spent the second night reading Shakespeare just for fun. How else would anyone ever have the time for that? There was so much to do and learn about the world, and finally I had the chance to see it all. It was the best thing I could have ever hoped for.
The one thing the mice hadn’t mentioned during their experiments, however, was that you can still dream without sleeping. They started on the third day, little visual abnormalities that danced around the corner of my vision. Patterns, or shapes, or textures just drifting idly by. I actually enjoyed them at first, but the longer I went without sleep, the more real they became. By the fifth day I actually started seeing fully formed people walking alongside me. They were always in my peripheral vision, and as soon as I turned to face them, they disappeared.
It was the evening of the sixth day when I opened my bedroom to see a smiling figure sitting on my bed. It didn’t even have a face – just teeth which wrapped all the way up around up to where its ears should be. I splashed cold water in my face and the thing disappeared, but it still freaked me out.
I decided to take a break from the drug then, but even without it, I couldn’t sleep that night. There must have still been some in my system. I tossed and turned, and every time I got up, that figure with the teeth was there watching me. Every time I jolted myself awake, it would linger a little longer in my room. Just silently smiling.
I managed to get through the next day – still off the drug, and still seeing the creature out of the corner of my eye wherever I looked. I got used to him though and even began to nod off during the psych lecture. After class, I decided to call in sick from work and just go sleep. Ricky was trying to talk to me, but I was so tired I couldn’t even figure out what he was saying. It was hard to even look at him with the creature standing next to us. I just mumbled something and turned to leave, but the idiot kept following me.
I shouldn’t have shoved him, but I was so tired I couldn’t deal with pretending to be his friend anymore. He stumbled back a few paces – right into the smiling creature. The weirdest thing was, I swear he bounced off the creature and looked over his shoulder. It seems stupid to think he could see my dream, but I was so tired I wasn’t thinking straight. I just bolted and ran.
Ricky was still following me though – he was insistent. Something about there being a security camera at the lab. That we had to get our story straight about what we were doing there. I don’t know. I just wanted to get home. I just wanted to sleep. I ducked into an alley between the psych and sociology buildings, but I couldn’t lose him. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to the ground, and I didn’t have the strength to fight him off. I was too tired to get up, so I just lay there and let him yell at me. My mind was so numb with exhaustion, even the sound of his shouting faded into a gentle white noise, and I must have fallen asleep right there on the ground.
His body was mangled almost beyond recognition. The police told me there were witnesses who saw me jump on top of Ricky and bite
his face into a bloody pulp. They said I had some kind of inhuman strength, and that it took almost a dozen people to drag me off him. They said I hurled him like a rag doll into the building, dislocating both his shoulders and smashing one of the bricks into powder. I don’t know how I could have done it while I was asleep. All I know is that when i was about to drift off, I saw my creature standing behind Ricky, and the last thing I saw before closing my eyes was its teeth sinking into his neck.
The court blamed the incident on the drug and I’ve been transferred to a rehab clinic. It’s been four days since I’ve last taken Orexin, but the creature hasn’t gone away. Every time I close my eyes, it’s sitting a little closer. Sooner or later I’m going to fall asleep, and it’s going to take control again. I’m writing this because if I can’t stay awake, I want someone out there to know.
Don’t blame me for what he does when I’m asleep.
I’m fighting it for as long as I can.
Burning Desire
I’m saying this as a confession. I can’t explain how it happened, but I know it’s my fault because it started with me hurting myself. And it’s not like I wanted attention or anything – okay, well as long as I’m being honest I wouldn’t mind someone noticing me – but that isn’t why I burned myself. And it definitely isn’t why I killed myself, but I’m getting ahead now.
I was in class one day when someone set a fire in the chemistry lab. Probably Jason – that idiot was always using the Bunsen burners to melt pens. and glue. and whatever he could get his hands on. Anyway the fire drill started and the whole High-school was paraded out into the parking lot like we practiced during drills. Everyone was laughing and screaming, and I’d just gotten out of a math test I wasn’t ready for so I didn’t mind.
While we were standing in the parking lot, I overheard Lisa say that Sammy, the kid in the wheelchair, got stuck on the elevator during the drill. It’s not hard to overhear things since I hang on her every word, but you would too if that blonde goddess was standing next to you wearing a punk-plaid skirt and a sweater almost tight enough to see through… what was I saying? Oh right, well rumor had it that another kid went back into the school to get Sammy out. No one knew who it was, but they were already talking about him like he was a hero.
