51 Sleepless Nights

by Tobias Wade

  “Get out. Get out of the house!” I shouted.

  There was an explosion from the bathroom and a scream. I leaped straight over the back of the sofa – too late. The lights came back on, but she wouldn’t wake up. Somehow the electrical surge had entered the water. I threw up in the sink. Both her and the baby were boiled alive.

  I went back to my computer. I straightened out the sofa. I sat down. The screen was dark, but the words were still burned into the monitor.

  I threw the laptop as hard as I could against the wall, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. I knocked the sofa over. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t my fault. But if I hadn’t said those things…

  A scream from the bathroom – a helpless, scared, infantile scream. I was there almost before the tipping sofa hit the ground.

  My wife was still lolling grotesquely in the tub like a boiled plastic doll. The baby – my baby – my little girl – she was alright. Her skin wasn’t even red anymore. I picked her up and held her to my chest, sobbing. But she wasn’t crying anymore. Was she okay? I pulled her back to arm’s length to look at her, and she smiled at me. The sweet innocent smile – nothing in the world was wrong with her. It even looked like she was trying to say something.

  “I’ve set you free too, friend, “she said.

  The first words my daughter ever spoke, and they weren’t even hers.

  The Human Sacrifice

  What do you do when you’re forced to choose between sacrificing your best friend, or letting her kill you?

  Depression. Social Anxiety. Crippling insecurity. And of course, the voice. My therapist keeps insisting that my only road to recovery is to open up about what happened to me, so here goes. This is the story of how I killed my best friend.

  We were just two freshmen girls in high-school– I can’t believe it has been three years already. Riley and I used to be inseparable. I practically lived on her living room floor. We went everywhere together, watched all the same anime (making a duet out of every theme song). We took all the same classes, even though she had to fail her math placement exam just to be with me. So when I heard her parents talking about summer camp, I basically just invited myself. Two months without her was unimaginable. I didn’t even know who I was without her validating my dumb jokes. (Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead. Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree? It was following the first monkey!)

  My parents said okay, and I had never been more excited for anything in my life. We were going to spend the whole summer doing arts and crafts ( making Popsicle stick battleships and destroying other people’s projects), telling campfire stories (Riley is terrified of Witches for some reason, bwhaha), and playing sports. Okay, I could do without the sports, but either she would be on my team and we could just goof off in the back, or I was playing against her and we could DESTROY each other in a competition so brutal that would make the Spartan’s wince.

  On our first day there we took a group hike through the woods. The counselors were a pair of horny college freshman who kept making awkward advances toward each other, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Less supervision means more freedom. So when I dared Riley to eat some mushrooms we found growing by the trail, there was no-one paying enough attention to stop her from eating a fistful. I don’t know if that makes me a bad person by itself, but I was definitely a bad person for laughing at her when she got the shits. She walked like a penguin with hemorrhoids for a while, pretending it was no big deal. Before long, she couldn’t take it though and had to go off in the woods. I kept watch for her, and the rest of the troop went on without us.

  Riley kept worrying someone was going to see her though, and she went way farther off the trail than she needed to. That’s where she found the circle of branches in a little clearing. That’s the place where she died.

  I can’t do this. I don’t want to write this. I don’t want to relive how those branches looked, covered in her blood. I don’t want to hear the voice – it hasn’t stopped calling for me since. Please let it stop after I’ve gotten this off my chest.

  By the time Riley finished her business – which was way longer than either of us expected, the rest of the troop had gone too far to catch up with. I remembered that they were taking the same trail from the hilltop, so I figured we’d just wait here for them to pick us up on the way back. Riley didn’t want to stay around the circle, but that made me want to hang out here even more. It took awhile of teasing and prodding before she admitted it looked like a Witch circle. I guess her family had a long history of Witch related incidents. Riley’s Mother was thoroughly convinced she was cursed after a confrontation with some old crone, and her great-Grandmother was actually burned at the stake. While we waited, Riley told me about how someone in her family was accused of witchcraft practically every generation since they got here from Germany like 200 years ago.

  She was obviously still feeling sick from the mushrooms, and feeling embarrassed for being left behind. The circle made her uncomfortable, and it was starting to get darker, so I did what any best friend would do. I started making weird voices to try and freak her out. I didn’t really know what sound Witch’s make, so I settled for some general cackling, a couple mentions of turning her into a toad, and of course using her eyes for my latest potion. To her credit, she remained pretty cool about it, and even started joining in with me to see who could make the best cackle. The look on her face though, it’s burned into my memory. Those wide, strained eyes. The tremor under her skin. The tautness of her face pulled so tightly it looked like it would snap.

  Because when she had stopped cackling, the sound didn’t stop. It kept laughing and laughing, growing deeper with every iteration. We’d been goofing off for so long, we didn’t notice how late it had gotten. The sun was setting, and the rest of the campers should have been back by now. But it wasn’t them making the sound.

  There was a figure standing in the middle of the circle, kneeling on the ground, enshrouded in a thick cloak like what a medieval monk might wear. The sound was coming from it. We didn’t care whether it was a joke, or prank – we weren’t sticking around. We gave each other one look – that’s all we ever needed to know what the other was thinking – and bolted out of the circle. At least we would have, but the branches seemed to have a mind of their own. Something grabbed our ankles, and we both fell trying to climb out of the circle. I turned around, and the cloaked figure was standing over us.

  You know what happens next. You know I sacrificed Riley in that circle. It was fast, but it wasn’t clean. Even a pocket knife can cut through to the jugular, but it still took her a long time to bleed out.

  The part I haven’t told you – the part my therapist says I need to tell you – is that the Witch didn’t make me do it. I chose to kill her.

  I was screaming. Riley wasn’t. She was always the one with a phobia about Witch’s. It was stupid for me to be more scared than her. I tried to scramble up again, but this time it was Riley who dragged me back down. The cloaked figure removed its hood, but underneath it was only one of the camp counselors. An awkward teenage boy.

  “I really got you, didn’t I?” He said, laughing in a good natured way. Not at all like that deep laughter that wouldn’t stop. “Guess that’ll teach you not to sneak off on your own.”

  “But the cloak –” I managed.

  “Got it from the art shed to scare you,” he replied. “We’re going to bedazzle it for our camp mascot later this week. Come on you two, let’s head back. Everyone was worried.”

  There were tears in my eyes. I was so relieved, but even more embarrassed. Great, first day of camp, and we were already going to be the butt of everyone’s joke. I figured Riley must have been even more embarrassed than me though, because her wide eyes were still bulging from her head. Her skin looked as pale as death in the fading light.

  “This place. It’s calling to me. I heard it laughing,” she said, hardly above a whisper.
r />   “Alright, jokes over,” I replied. I just wanted to get back to the camp before everyone was talking about us.

  “Come on girls, let’s not miss the bonfire,” the counselor was climbing over the branches.

  “Don’t you hear it? Don’t you hear it laughing?” Riley asked, turning on the counselor.

  “Nice try, but you can’t scare me. I’m the one who –”

  He was dead before he knew what hit him. One of the branches shot straight through his heart. It lifted him from the ground, growing like a tree would if it were sped up ten thousand times. More branches rose from the circle, impaling him one after another. I can still hear the SNAP as they break off under his skin. I was screaming again. I couldn’t help myself. Riley was laughing – that same deep laugh which wouldn’t stop a moment before.

  “I’m waking up,” Riley said. “The sacrifice will feed me, but I’m still hungry. I’m waking up.”

  The branches kept lifting the counselor’s body higher off the ground. The whole forest was starting to come alive around us. Everything was shaking. The moon was getting brighter. The birds stopped singing, and one by one began dropping dead from the branches. Riley’s face was aging – years every second. Her eyes were pools of blackness. Her skin was wrinkled and coarse. And the branches – the branches were coming at me.

  That’s when I slit her throat. I didn’t know what else to do. I dug my little knife into her. I wish she had screamed, or fought me, or thanked me for stopping her. But as soon as I did, the forest settled back down. The branches suspending the counselor broke, and he fell back into the circle. It was just me, covered in her blood, and the two dead bodies beside me.

  When I got back to camp, I told everyone that the counselor tried to rape my friend. That he was the one to kill her, and that I killed him with a branch. I couldn’t tell them the truth. And I especially couldn’t tell them what Riley said to me as I plunged my little knife into her throat.

  “I am not this fragile body. You will continue to feed me, and I will still wake up.”

  The voice hasn’t stopped since then. It keeps telling me to go places, to do things to people – horrible things I wouldn’t dream of doing. And I just keep ignoring it, but it’s getting harder and harder. It’s so hungry, I can’t stop it forever. So I’m doing what my therapist told me to do. I’m writing down the whole truth, and I’m praying that it will leave me alone. I don’t want to die like she died – I don’t want to kill like she killed. I miss Riley. I miss my friend. I just want this to be over.

  Countdown to the Beast

  Your countdown will begin as soon as you finish this story.

  The clock struck TWELVE, and I was fast asleep. From the darkness of my mind woke a strange echoing laughter, ringing out as a bell chiming its twelve tolls. Rhythmic laughter, hollow laughter, like a broken toy which mimics life in macabre falsity.

  “Why are you laughing?” I asked the darkness of my dream.

  “I laugh because I am afraid,” it says, the laughter unabated by the words.

  “When I’m afraid, I scream,” I told it in a matter-of-fact tone. “You’re only supposed to laugh when something is funny.”

  “But I daren’t let him know that I am afraid, and so I laugh,” cackled the voice.

  “What is there to be afraid of?” I ask.

  “Lots of things. I’m afraid of how people will remember me, and I’m afraid that they don’t anymore. I’m afraid of noises without forms, and forms without noise. I’m afraid of pain without a source, because it can’t be stopped. I’m afraid of a source without pain, because it means that I’m already gone. But most of all, I’m afraid of time.”

  “What is frightening about time?”

  “Nothing, so long as it’s there. But I’m afraid of time running out. I’m afraid of ELEVEN, so I laugh,” the voice trembled.

  “The number 11?” I am quite mystified. “What about that makes you afraid?”

  “I am afraid because it isn’t twelve. I’m afraid because twelve is gone forever. I’m afraid because he’s already here, the beast who devours time.”

  “Who is here?” I asked in alarm. I could still hear the laughter when I woke up. I don’t know which was more unsettling: thinking I was still dreaming, or realizing that I was the one laughing. The sun was bright though, flooding my little room through the window my mother was opening.

  “You must have had a very funny dream to laugh like that. I didn’t want to wake you, but it’s time for school.”

  “How early is it?” I asked blearily, sitting up in bed.

  “TEN you normally get up,” she said clearly.

  “Ten? What?! I’m already late, why did you let me sleep so long?” I sprang from bed and began flinging through the clothes on the floor, looking for something clean to wear.

  “What are you rushing for?” she said, laughing. “I said WHEN you normally wake up. It’s only seven now. Take your time, get dressed, the eggs will be ready in a few minutes.” She laughed to see me frozen in confusion with one leg half-stuffed into my trousers, and left the room. There is something I didn’t like about her laugh right then. It seemed too loud and forced. Too artificial. I shrugged and dressed leisurely in a slightly used t-shirt and heavily used jeans, gathering up my spread of books and pens left out for homework the night before.

  I came downstairs presently, and sat down at the kitchen table, rubbing my eyes. My younger sister was already sitting there, glancing disinterestedly through the paper as she looked for comics. She was two years younger than me in fourth grade, sitting cross legged in her chair with hair bunched up into pigtails which bounced when she spoke. The smell of eggs was familiar and comforting, and I could hear the bacon sizzling along beside it.

  “Newspaper off the table,” mother said, steering the heavily laden plates into place.

  “Anything happen today?” I asked my sister Clara as she folded the paper and tucked it away.

  “NINE,” she replied distinctly.

  “What?”

  “I said no. Can’t you hear?”

  “No, you said nine. I heard you say nine.”

  “Wake up, idiot,” she replied, adding a conspiratorial wink.

  “Children be good. Now eat up before the bus comes,” mother said, sitting down beside us.

  “Mom, what happens when time runs out?” my sister asked mother innocently between mouthfuls. I dropped my fork laden with eggs, and it rattled to the floor in the sudden silence.

  “Time doesn’t run out, dear. It goes on forever.”

  “But, I mean if it did. What would happen?” Clara persisted. I pushed my chair back and kneeled down to retrieve my fork, listening intently.

  “Well, I suppose nothing would happen. We’d all just sort of be stuck, wouldn’t we? Nothing would happen forever. Now eat up, I’m going to go wake your father.” Mother stood and glided from the room, but I didn’t notice her leave. I don’t know how, but Clara knew about my dream.

  “Why the Hell would you ask that?” I demanded. A ringing echo of laughter danced along the back of my brain, and I shivered involuntarily.

  “EIGHT don’t know,” she said, shuffling her eggs about her plate.

  “What?!”

  “I said ‘I don’t know!’” she snapped. “What’s wrong with you today?” Then after a pause, she added: “I suppose it’s because time is running out. I just wanted to know what will happen then. I don’t think mother is right though. Do you know what I think will happen?” she looked directly at me with wide and curious eyes.

  “No, and I don’t care,” I replied.

  “I think,” she ignored me, speaking as though to herself, “I think that when our time runs out in this waking world we become the one in the dream.”

  “What do you know about my dream? What happened to you?” I asked.

  “But that doesn’t seem so bad to me,” she said, eyes still wide. I shifted slightly as though to stand,
and her eyes did not follow me. She spoke on as though completely unaware of my presence. “When we’re in the dream, we get to be the one who laughs. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Even if we’re afraid, we’ll still get to laugh.”

  “Mmm, I’m starving,” I heard my father’s voice from the hall. “Is that freshly cooked bacon? Smells like SEVEN!”

  “Like heaven,” I mumbled to myself. “He said it smells like heaven.”

  “No he diddd-nnn’t,” my sister giggled quietly in a sing-song voice.

  I leapt to my feet and confronted her, but she was now focusing on her plate once more, and showed no signs of continuing her thoughts. This wasn’t making any sense. Time can’t run out, and dreams are just dreams. Clara was playing a game. She liked games. She liked to tease me. But how does she know of my dream? I shook it away and ran from the room. It didn’t matter. I just had to get out of here. It was going to be a normal school day, with lunch at 11:30, gym in the afternoon, and music after that, and nothing was strange at all. In a matter of seconds, I was standing on the street corner, one shoe untied, hair uncombed, teeth un-brushed, and a stinging wind bringing me back to reality.

  I laughed at how silly I was being, and laughed again to think what my sister would say if she knew how scared I had been. Then I laughed a third time because I couldn’t stop, and a fourth because I noticed the laughter rang out in short evenly spaced bursts, like the ringing of a bell. I laughed a fifth time, and then a sixth, and the sweat began to form on my forehead. I couldn’t stop. I clasped my hands over my mouth, but my body was shaking so badly I couldn’t contain myself. Gasping for breath, a seventh ringing laughter escaped me. Each was spaced perfectly, with perfectly consistent duration, and the same hollow ring which resounded like the creature in the darkness of my sleep. The next I knew, I was sitting on the cold side walk, looking down at my untied shoe. Clara had just left the house, perfectly neat and ordered with her pink backpack zipped tight and slung over both shoulders. She was looking down at me and smiling.