Watter.
It can bring unspeakable horror to the most familiar places. Your morning shower.
“A tranquil river bank. Or the endless ocean.”
It's time to dive deep into the abyss. From the dark waters of the Cape Fear River, immerse yourself in horror as you. Brace yourself for the no-sleep podcast. Welcome to the no-sleep podcast. I'm your host, David Cummings. To my fellow kids out there, I hope y'all are having a skibby day. Glad we have the aura
“to know what Sigma's we are. And you know what really has the riz? The crime wave at C2.0”
crews. There's still time to sign up for this amazing crews with so many great podcasters
in the world of true crime and horror. Make sure you follow the link in the show notes to get your code for $100 off and the special meet and greet with the no-sleep team. Featuring me, the risler, David Cummings. Jessica McAvoy, Peter Lewis, Lindsey Russo, and Graham Rowett. And of course, the maestro Brandon Boone will be rocking his 6/7 all over the ship. Make February of 2027 the best time ever on the crime wave at C2.0 crews.
Now you might be feeling cooked after hearing me use all the cool slang terms we young kids use these days. And if you think I'm Dululu, you may be right. Because truth be told, I have very little
“idea what I was actually just saying. Isn't that always the case with young people and adults?”
The kids have their own language and the oldies just scratch their heads and yell at clouds. Why is it we so rarely pay attention to what kids are saying? Especially when they're trying to tell us about things going very wrong. It's almost like that idea could make for great horror stories. Young people are dealing with strange circumstances and hardships and it's usually far too late before people start listening to them and believing them. If that sounds like a good story idea to
you, you're in luck because those are the tales awaiting you this week. So take it from punk. No cap. These stories aren't us. They slay. Now it's time to plunge into the horror of our
sleepless tales. In our first tale, we meet a man of letters. No, not a scholarly man, a man who has an
odd relationship with one letter in particular and intense fear of it. You see in this tale shared with us by author John Beardify. We learn that Brady has a good reason to be afraid and it will take a good hipnotherapist to help him solve the problem. Performing this tale are Atticus Jackson, Peter Lewis, Danielle McCray and Graham Rowett. So you might dislike some things, you might fear others, but you may need help if you have a phobia.
I understand that it's frightening, but you can't keep living your life like this. You've got to try something, and Dr. Oberon is the best. The concern in my aunt Kelly's eyes was so sweet and
sincere that it made me want to puke. This was the third intervention my family had held.
You have another attempt to get me to move out of my parent's basement, find ...
a normal life. We didn't want it to come to this Brady, but this time you forced our hand.
You've got to make a change. That was an easy thing to say for my father, someone who didn't live in constant fear of the 24th letter of the alphabet. It started some time around my 10th birthday. I would swoon in pass out in class or it'd be overcome by crying fits for no apparent reason. Everyone suspected the worst, and then a pattern began to emerge. It wasn't an undetected tumor or a rare neurological disorder. It was just those two innocent
“crossed lines. Sick as the sounds, I think my parents were almost disappointed.”
My condition wasn't something that people were in marathons for. There were no TV commercials with
sappy music about the fear of a letter. From the very beginning, they thought that I was the problem. I just wasn't trying hard enough to overcome my phobia. Then my aunt Kelly came into the picture. At Kelly was the successful one. The one everyone in our family was told to emulate. She was a doctor, married with two kids, and had even been featured in the local newspaper.
One talent and Kelly did not have, however, was keeping her mouth shut.
“She was constantly telling her elite medical co-workers about my condition,”
hoping that one of them could provide a miracle cure.
Well, thanks to Aunt Kelly, I had tried everything from cognitive behavioral therapy to designer drugs that weren't even on the market. None of it had helped, and Aunt Kelly was getting desperate, maybe even more so than my own parents. My phobia was the one problem she wasn't able to solve. The one puzzle piece in her life that she just couldn't force into place. As a result, her suggestions grew successfully.
Stranger. According to Aunt Kelly, Dr. Oberon was one of the best hypnotherapists on the East Coast.
“When she told him about my case, he had taken a personal interest in it.”
He was willing to see me for a fraction of his usual fee. My parents were overjoyed by the news, but I was skeptical. Then in there, I made up my mind to secretly record the session on my phone before this doctor put me under hypnosis. After all the false promises and snake oil treatments that Aunt Kelly's last round of experts had promised me, I wanted to have
some evidence of my own. Something that I could use to get out of being sent to some wacky meditation retreat, or forced to do a cranberry juice detox. More than that, however, I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to hear in my own hypnotized words. Why? I was so afraid of something so absurd. Dr. Oberon's office didn't have the fancy facade, or smiling robot-like receptionists
that I was used to. There wasn't any marble lobby, tropical plants, or ambient music. It was located in an ugly 70-Zara strip mall with nothing nearby, but if your apartments sanded overgrown park. The stained carpet was mustered colored. The fluorescent lights hummed and flickered. The waiting area featured two thrift store chairs in a coffee table whose laminate wood coating was beginning to peel off. It wasn't a promising start.
Just as my parents were swapping a glance, the office door opened and Dr. Oberon himself stepped out to greet us. The atmosphere in the room changed immediately. Even I felt the tension go out of my shoulders. Dr. Oberon looked just how I imagined a hypnotherapist should look.
Earth-tone clothes neatly trimmed go-t toward his shell glasses.
but not pushy. And almost felt like we knew each other already. He talked to me, not only to my parents, and made it clear what was going to happen. We would start by practicing a few hypnosis techniques to see which words best for me. From there, we would begin to investigate my memories from around the time when my phobia had begun. Dr. Oberon doubted that we would finish in a single session, but it all depended on how much
progress we made. When I told him that I'd never been hypnotized before, he just laughed.
“There's a door in everybody's mind. All you have to do is find it.”
My parents weren't thrilled about spending an hour in the grimy waiting room and decided to do some shopping before picking me up after the session. My condition had put a strain on my relationship with my parents, and ordinarily, parting was our leave. But not that day. As Dr. Oberon led me inside, I felt a sudden urge to grab my father's hand and beg him to let me leave with him. Then the moment passed, the door closed on my parents' concerned faces, and I followed Dr. Oberon
into his office. There was something comfortable about the sparse and shabby furniture. I don't need to rely on appearances, it seemed to say. I rely on results.
As I sat on the lumpy-plad couch, I realized that for the first time in a long time,
I actually had hope that a treatment could work. I might actually be able to live a normal life again. It made me feel guilty about recording the session with our Dr. Oberon's knowledge, but I had promised myself that I would. And a promise is a promise. Before I lay down and closed my eyes, I reached into my pocket and hit the record button on my phone. 45 minutes later, I opened my eyes to Dr. Oberon's smiling face.
All done. I scratched my head. I didn't feel any different. It was just like waking up from a long,
“restful nap. I barely remember to reach into my pocket and furtively turn off the recording.”
When my parents arrived, Dr. Oberon greeted them with optimism. You might take some time for the treatment to show results, but I'm confident in the outcome. I couldn't help but agree. As I walked out of the office, I no longer felt that crushing helplessness that I usually did when circumstances forced me to go outside. I was no longer dreading that a sudden, unanticipated encounter with that letter would send me
into a panic attack. There was a new spring in my step when I followed my parents into the house, and I went directly to my room to listen to my recording. I wanted to see what Dr. Oberon had done.
“In the first few minutes, we're so warped and distorted that I almost gave up on the whole thing.”
It was as old a pitch of whatever was happening was beyond the range of what my cell phone could record. Then things stabilized. And Dr. Oberon began to speak. "Can you hear me, Brady?" "Yes." "A shiver went up my spine. I barely recognized my own voice. It was toneless, dead, mechanical hypnotized." "There is a letter you're afraid of, Brady. Would you mind telling me which one it is?" "The letter, X."
Even in the safety of my bedroom, just hearing it made my heart race. "I wanted to scream, why me?" "I wondered. Why did I have to be so frightened of such a ridiculous thing?" "No, Brady. I want you to think back to the week before your phobia began. Can you do that for me?" "Yes." "What do you see?" "A playground. I'm looking out a car window. There's a lot of leaves
On the trees.
The radio was on. It's talking about a kid who went missing in town. My mother switches it off.
“"Who were you meeting at the park that day, Brady? My friends, Alec and Jocelyn?"”
"Tell me about them. Alec and I became friends in kindergarten. He was on the bigger side and got
bullied a lot for it. Most of the kids in our class never knew what a funny town to die he was.
Jocelyn had just transferred to our school earlier that week and she was the only girl I'd ever met who liked to skateboard. We didn't really have a plan for what we wanted to do that day. Swing from the monkey bars, toss the ball around, stomp around in the woods beside the park.
“"What happened next?" "I get out of the car. I wave goodbye to my parents and hello to Alec's mom.”
She's sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette. I'm relieved that she's the one watching us.
Because she usually lets us do pretty much whatever we want. Alec is sitting on top of the monkey bars. Jocelyn is kicking a ball as hard as she can against a sender block wall. She aims at me next. I duck the ball and laugh. It rolls to a stop against the wooden tower beside the monkey bars. There's gone, Brady. There's one of them carved into the ground and X. Like someone dragged their feet through the mulch again and again to make it.
I point it out to Alec. He laughs and says that maybe we should dig for buried treasure. I tell him, I don't think that's a good idea, not at all. I feel cold, all of a sudden, there's something wrong about that letter. Like it doesn't belong there and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Jocelyn changes the subject right away. She says something about how she saw a deer skull by the entrance to the park and now we should go check it out.
We leave the X behind that day. I scratched my head. I could recall Alec and Jocelyn well enough, even if I hadn't seen them in years. In every one in town remember the rash of disappearances that happened in the early 2000s, but I had no memory of the afternoon that I had just
“described to Dr. Oberon. Are you saying you saw that letter again on a different day, Brady?”
We need at the park again a week later. It's a holiday, the fourth of July, I think. I'm excited about the fireworks and the hamburgers that my dad's gonna grill later. This time, Jocelyn's dad is keeping an eye on us. He's a tall bald guy who wears his polo shirt tucked in and his pants buckled up so high that I can see his socks. He's the polar opposite of Alec's
mom always yelling at us to get down from that tree or don't run so fast. The whole afternoon is
sort of lame and I can tell that Jocelyn's embarrassed. Alec's mom shows up at sunset and he hops into her truck like he can't wait to be gone. My own parents are late. Jocelyn's dad keeps checking his watch and scouting at me. He clearly has some place to be, but he doesn't want the guilt of
Leaving a child alone.
I'm sure my own parents will show up any minute. With one last look at his watch, he grabs Jocelyn
“by the wrist and practically drags her to their mini van. It's twilight now and the sky has”
clouted over. There aren't many streetlights in the park and the happy couples and dog walkers are all long gone. I'm starting to get genuinely worried. My parents have been late before but
never like this. On the other side of the man made late at the center of the park,
someone is setting off fireworks. The bright reds and greens and purples light up the sky. And I see that I'm not the only kid left in the park. There's a blonde boy about my age coming
“down the paved trail by the woods. He's dancing. It's like a waltz except he's all alone.”
And if there's any music, I can't hear it over the noise of the fireworks.
There's something wrong with the smile on his face. It almost looks
stapled in place. A younger boy is running after him, tugging at his sleeves, trying to get him to stop. Then when they reach the tree line, the blonde boy stops. The smaller kid who looks like he's probably his brother. Suddenly seems afraid. Stop at Cameron. He starts yelling. What's wrong
“with you? The kid called Cameron picks up the smaller boy. throws him over his shoulder and starts”
dancing off with him, twirling away into the woods. The smaller kid is screaming, but the fire works drown it out. I take one last look around for my parents. Their car is nowhere in sight. So I jog down the hill. By the time I get there, the pair have already gone into the trees.
I hesitate. I've never been so far into the forest that I couldn't see the playground on the hill
and especially not at night. Then I hear the smaller kid scream again. I push aside the bushes and go into the woods, shouting after him. It's dark. I can only see by the colorful explosions of the fireworks. I catch a flash of Cameron's yellow hair or the smaller kid's pale legs sticking up in the air. Then they're gone. I hear the sort of clicking noise. Like a wooden box being latched shut. I'm suddenly afraid that this was all some kind of trap for some reason.
I imagine the blonde boy creeping up behind me with an insane smile on his face, but it's quiet. Where the pair have gone, they're beyond my reach now. The fireworks have stopped. It's starting to rain. From the park behind me, I can hear my parents frantically calling my name. I follow the sound of their voices out to the parking lot. We're both of them throw their arms around me. Their car had broken down while they were shopping on the other side of town.
I'm going to take in the hours to get moving again. As the hug me and walk me back to the car, I look over my shoulder at the forest. The blonde boy Cameron comes out of the trees. He's still doing that weird sick dance.
He moves up to the playground and uses his foot to draw that letter in the mu...
Then he walks his off. I want to tell my parents, but he's already gone.
And the whole experience was just too strange. In the car, I start to sniffle. I can feel myself coming down with something. This time, I remembered what I had told Dr. Oberon. Mostly. Justline's kill joy father. Waiting around the park until after dark.
And having a fever for the next couple days. The kids in the woods though. That was new.
“I continued listening. Did you ever tell anyone else about what you saw?”
Yes, later that July and Alex house. It's his birthday. When his basement, eating pizza and playing sonic the hedgehog on Alex Dreamcast, upstairs, the TV is on. And I can hear Alex's mom cracking open beers for the adults. During a moment when the three of us are alone, I told them both about what happened in the park after they left. Alex thinks I'm bullshitting them. Justline isn't so sure. They both want to meet at the park
that Saturday and investigate the woods. Discussing the experience again is nerve-wracking. And my throat has gone dry. I go upstairs for some more mountain dew. As I'm on my way back, the football game on the adult's television is interrupted by an update on the search for the two missing children in our area. The newscaster is interviewing a middle-age woman and her son. The boy's little brother is missing. It's Cameron. The blonde boy I saw in the woods.
In the meantime, some other kids have shown up and I have to go home before I get a chance
“to tell Alex and Justline what I just learned. Did you meet your friends at the park that Saturday?”
I don't think so. Not exactly. My parents were concerned about the disappearances better safe than sorry they're saying. They're making me stay home. I'm tearing off and getting red faced. I slammed the door to my bedroom and tried to call Alex house, but it's too late. All I can do is look out the window at the power lines and tree tops knowing that Alex and Justline are out there solving the mystery without me. It's not fair.
It was eerie. Hearing my 20-year-old mouth replicates so perfectly the tone of voice side-hatt as a child. Downstairs, I can hear that my parents are having some friends over. They're talking, laughing, eating the nasty fancy foods that adults eat when they have parties. They've forgotten all about me. My parents locked my bedroom door, but not the window. It's easy to climb out onto the roof above the kitchen and shimmy down the drain pipe
“and the park can't be more than a few miles away. I know the way there. I think.”
Cars are whizzing by. A few miles is a lot further than I thought.
I've never gone so far by myself before and in the sheer thickness of the world is suddenly
Overwhelming.
upon reaching the park. I discover that they aren't the only ones.
“The playground is deserted ever since the news of the third disappearance hit. No one is”
letting their children out to play. Well, almost no one. There's one truck in the parking lot and it belongs to Alex's mom. She was probably supposed to be watching Alex in Jocelyn while they played, but she's sitting behind the wheel with her hangover shades
on and she's fast to sleep. I figure that my friends must be in the woods already.
It isn't hard to see where they've gone. Alex's basketball in Jocelyn's skateboarder
“leaning up against a big, shag bark hickory at the tree line. It looks to be the same place”
that I saw Cameron walk out of the woods on the fourth of July. There's even a faint path through the undergrowth. I follow it. Alex, Jocelyn and I have been back here before. There's a half collapsed treehouse that Alex found last year up ahead and passed that an enormous multi-tire. It's the border between the part of the woods we know and whatever lies beyond. The day is hotter than usual, even for summer.
“The sweat running down my face and back, and I can hear the cicadas humming in the trees.”
I keep following the path. It branches several times and I take the biggest fork each time.
I'm starting to think I'm going in circles when I finally hear voices up ahead.
It's Alec and Jocelyn. There's stooping by the edge of a dark scummy pond. Jocelyn is speculating that the missing kids might be dead and that maybe their bodies are hidden inside. Alec throws a stone. It sends ripples racing across the dark water. I decide to give them a scare. There's an old fence and some overgrown concrete blocks beside the pond. I use them to sneak up on my unsuspecting friends.
Just as I'm about to jump out from behind them, I hear that clicking noise again. The one that sounded like a wooden box being unwatched. It is very, very close to me. Alec and Jocelyn here are two. They look at each other and are about to start searching around the pond when the music starts. Music. Someone is playing a flute. A slow haunting melody that makes my eyes glaze over. As the beat picks up, I notice that my legs are beginning to move. They're dancing on their own.
The music is affecting Alec and Jocelyn too. Their faces have gone slack, just like a shopping mall mannequins. And Alec is starting to shuffle his feet and I cover my ears. Whatever the song is doing, it affects Jocelyn the least. She turns and tries to run, but Alec grabs her wrist. She kicks and scratches, but something about the music is making him stronger than usual.
able to push his body past its ordinary limits. But Jocelyn is fighting. Then the others begin to come out of the woods. The others. The other missing kids.
They're all there.
They're dancing. They grab Jocelyn and twirl off with her. I can't see where they're going.
Alec doesn't want to be participating in any of this, but he's a prisoner in his own body. My follow him as he waltzes back out of the woods and up to the playground. Where he uses his foot to carve another one of those letters in the mulch. Now, there are five of them. Someone else is watching too. Behind me, I hear that clacking sound again. It's probably the flute being put back in its box.
Now that the music has stopped, it feels like we're both waking up from a dream. Alec walks down the hill, rubbing his shoulder. He asks me what I'm doing there.
“I don't know what to say. I can't remember. The lingering effects of the music cause”
everything that happened in the last several hours to slip into the deepest depths of my memory. Alec asks where Jocelyn is. I tell him that her father probably picked her up early again. To both of us, that seems like a reasonable enough explanation. I go home, climb back up the drain pipe, and crawl into bed.
From the sounds of the party downstairs, the adults never even suspected it that I was gone.
I sleep until the next morning. Over 17 hours. When I wake up, the supper my mother left for me has gone cold outside my door. When I wake up, I've completely forgotten about what happened in the woods. When I wake up, I'm terrified of the letter X. Anytime I see that letter scrolled on a wall or spray painted on a sidewalk or dug into the
mulch of a playground, some part of me knows what it might mean.
“And the police never asked you about Jocelyn's disappearance? No. Why would they?”
Alec was the only one who knew I was at the park that day. In his memories had also been wiped clean by that weird music. I'm sure the police spoke to him in his mom, but there was nothing
he could tell. And you never saw the person playing the flute in the woods that day.
You wouldn't recognize them even if you saw them again. No. I only heard the music. I see. Well, that settles it then. I'm going to start the process of waking you up now, Brady. When you open your eyes, you're going to forget about this entire conversation. And you will no longer be afraid of the letter X.
“That distorting noise began again. I realized that whatever it was, it was the key to Dr. Oberon's”
obnoxious technique. I listened until it finished. At any time, I expected to hear Dr. Oberon saying all done, announcing that the recording was coming to an end. But instead, I heard a different sound. The clock of a wooden box snapping shut. The police didn't want to listen to some mentally ill 20-somethings rant about his new psychologist.
They didn't understand what the noise at the end of my recording might signify.
Not being an education, employment, or training, however, I had all the time in the world.
“I was persistent. And in the end, they sent a token patrol to interview Dr. Oberon.”
When they arrived, however, they discovered something strange. The famous hypnotist was not in his office, and apparently had not been for some time. The space wasn't even rented out in his name. It had been least using the identity of a homeless man who had hung himself a few days earlier. As famous and well-regarded as Dr. Oberon had apparently been,
no one could remember attending university or undergoing their hospital residency with him.
His certifications apparently were fakes, and the man himself was gone. He took my foe be a with him, but he left me with a different kind of fear. I often wonder if I was better off being afraid without knowing why.
“What happened to Johnson and the other missing children?”
How many other towns, parks, schools, and playgrounds have had their own little role of exes, without anyone there to uncover their secret? Why does this man who called himself Dr. Oberon mark his crimes at all? Is it a ritual? Or just his calling card? I don't have any answers. Except the ones that come to me in my nightmares, I sometimes dream of a massive
barren room. It's windowless, maybe underground, and it isn't quite clear where light is coming from. The room is full of dancing children. I recognize Jocelyn and Cameron's little brother, the girl with braces from the woods. They have an ageed. I've been changed a bit apart from their eyes. Their eyes are inky black. In my dreams, they all turned to me, grinning from ear to ear, inviting me
to join in their dance. Let's take a short break for our sponsors, who help us keep our heads above water. For waves of ad-free horror content, join our sleepless universe by going to sleepless.thenosleepodcast.com.
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Kids can do some crazy things. Pray on art on the walls. Seeing if your phone can be flushed down the toilet, letting strange things in through the bedroom window at night. And if at last one caught your attention, you'll want to hear this story shared with us by author Beth Carpenter.
“You see little May wants to let in an insect outside her bedroom? That's sweet, right?”
Well not so sweet for May's mom. Performing this tale are Ash Milman, Erica Sanderson, Jake Benson, and Andy Cresswell. So when things are drawn to the light,
you can always shut off the lights so they don't become beacons.
The sound of clanking from a five-year-old bedroom is an unmistakable portant of trouble, especially after midnight. I was half asleep and on my way to my own bed, but as I walked past my daughter's door, I heard the metallic clank and worse, the giggle, and a alarm shot my tired brain full of home brood espresso. I wheeled around and threw the door open. May was kneeling on her window sill, one foot still resting on top of the boxy old radiator which
she'd clearly used to climb up. There was a keyed lock on the window, and her fat little fingers
“were busy turning the key I had left in it. Why had I imagined that it was high enough to be out”
of her reach? If you pushed her way to go into the gas, she would pitch out head first. I could see it happening in my mind's eye, every little cinematic detail exaggerated rendered in graceful slow motion, and must have crossed that room in one bound. I grabbed her by the back of her pajama shirt, hooked my other arm around her waist, and hauled her backwards. "What do you think you're doing?" "Sweetie!" She gazed up at me with surprised, sleepy innocence. "I'm letting him in, he wants to
come in. He says it to cold outside." May is five, deeply worrying things tumble out of her mouth
all the time, and they almost always match up to boring realities. Still, a chill did skittered
on my spine at that announcement, until I looked over at the window and had to laugh. There was a massive moth just outside, hammering shadowy wings into the glass. I guessed it was being drawn in by the little nightlight set up in one corner, which kept the darkness in May's room at an unthreatening sepia color. "Oh sweetheart, for one thing never tried to open window that way again. You know what could have happened? With you upon the edge like that, you could have fallen right out
and hurt yourself, okay? Secondly, moths don't belong inside. Our visitor is just confused by the light. He thinks it's nice in here, but actually he wouldn't like it at all, and he'd want to go right back out again. "Okay." That's right, now then. I dropped her onto her bed and the springs eaked. No more nighttime adventures, okay? You belong in here, and Mr. Moth belongs out there, and that's the way it's going to stay until morning. Go back to sleep. "Okay."
Her eyelashes were already fluttering down. I gently smoothed the duvet up across her. The moth was still bumping at the window. He was very large, and the sound he made was oddly loud and sharp, as if someone was wrapping their knuckles on the glass over and over. "Give it up."
“I took the key out of the lock and dropped it into my pocket. "You can't come in. I went”
on out of the room and listened for a moment at the door." "Sorry. I'm not loud." I smiled again and took myself to bed. No more strange sounds in the night. Everything on the right side of the glass. The next morning, made droop to little over a cornflakes, but she vacuumed them down just as fast as she normally did. She wanted to draw with their crayons after that, so I gave her a few pieces of paper and watched fondly as she scribbled all over them.
When she'd used up all the space on one page, she'd hold it up to show me until I made the appropriate cooling noises, and then flip the sheet over and start on the back as well. Right then, she was working with the intensity she usually say for drawing pictures of Daddy. She liked to do that,
maybe because when she showed them to me, I always told her how proud of her head be. How much
she would have loved her. How much she'd wanted to be with us. Watching her tongue peek out the corner of her mouth and her brow furrow, I got myself ready to repeat it all again. Non of it was true.
I believed it was, when I told him I was pregnant and watched his face light ...
when we'd made plans together, our voices overlapping in enthusiasm, so delighted with our future. He'd put his hands on my belly, though I was nowhere close to showing, and told me we'd do this together every step of the way. But of lies had danced inside me, but I hadn't felt nervous
“only eager. Once she was born though, things changed. I was so glad she didn't remember him.”
Deep down, gilterly, I was even glad he was dead. I was doing some washing up when she finished her masterpiece and called me over to look at it. I went back to the table, twisting the dish towel between my sudsy hands, ready to tell her she was a prodigy of art. But I hesitated when I saw
what she was holding up. It didn't seem to be a picture of her father at all. She always draws
him in green, because I told her that was his favourite colour, and it's her favourite too. No, this was a different vaguely human figure in blue. It was positioned against a boxy house with a five year old's grasp of positioning and perspective, making it look as if it was floating outside the upstairs window. The proportions were off, of course, but that wasn't surprising. I had a few pictures she'd drawn of me in her father in my room, and in almost all of them,
“my arms came down below my feet and his smile extended off his face. Who's that sweet, huh?”
Missed them off. He's blue, because he's cold, because he's outside. Oh, where are his wings? He doesn't have any. He can get up high without them. Oh, I'm pretty sure he did have wings when I saw him last night. Her face scrunched into a look of contemplation. She picked up a black crayon and drew two large loops on her figure's back. Like this? I shook off my uneas as I responded.
That's right. Very pretty, may. She peamed at me. She had a vivid imagination, of course. That was all. That, or Mothman, was out of his usual jurisdiction. And honestly, I thought maybe the flying imaginary friend was less creepy than the fictional version of her father I kept present with us. The real him would have seized with jealousy over such a replacement, and it would have liked to feel spiteful about getting to write the reality of the amount of our lives, but instead
it made me anxious. Gilty, but it made her happy. I sat down in front of the tally for a while and opened up my laptop to go over some spreadsheet, so as I perch next to her on the sofa. Their favourite shows are lively and loud, but I've had a lot of practice at tuning them out, and I was pretty deeply absorbed in my work. I didn't even notice the quiet knocking coming from our front door until May hopped up. "Someone's there, someone's knocking!"
She always gets excited about people at the door. She loves delivery guys,
getting to give them tips is the ultimate delight for her. I hand her the notes, and she holds her breath as she passes them on, imbuing the social ritual with all the gravitas of a druid performing a mystical ceremony. So she runs to the door whenever she hears knocking. I followed her as fast as I could, becoming more unsettled as I went. I wasn't expecting anybody today. More than that, something was odd about the sound from the door. It was
perfectly regular, almost mechanically so, and continuous. Most people banged a few times and then waited for an answer. Whoever was outside now, kept on and on as I came at the hall. When I reached the door, I gently nudged May aside and put my eye to the people. The glass was grimeer than I remembered it being. Some of you was dim and smudged, but I could just about make out of figure standing there. It was big. Kind of hunched over. It was still mocking.
“None of the neighbours had that. It's shape. May, can you go back into the living room?”
I wasn't sure I wanted her to be standing by me when I confronted whoever was out there, even with the security chain holding the door half shut. I waited until she'd gone before turning the door handle, feeling a final knock shudder through my hand as I did. The moment the door opened a crack, a whisper of a voice slipped through. "Let me in." The word sounded like they'd been breathed directly into my ear,
ending with a dry sob. I flinched and let go of the handle, and the door swung until the chain jerked it back, given me a clear view outside. No one was there. There was a single rose sitting
on the front step, and that was all. For a second I stood still, frozen by surprise, before I
started to scan up and down the street. No one. Maybe the visitor was hiding against the wall? I crane my neck. No one. Against my own better judgment, I ended the chain and pushed the door fully open. Nothing. It didn't seem possible, but somehow the person who'd been knocking
Could just vanish.
may shut past my hip and stoop to the front step with a hand out stretched. She must have gone
“into the living room and then immediately come right back, the little rules lawyer. "May, what?"”
I reached for her wrist, but I was too slow to catch her. "Look, Mummy!" She ducked my arm, taking a step inside, and then held up the rose. I stared at it. It was in full bloom, perfectly shaped, vividly red. Some kind of rust-colored liquid had splashed over the petals and was dripping off the long stem, over May's fingers and onto the mat just inside. The fluid soaked into the dark letters printed there, which spelled out "Welcome." I tried not to flinch backwards.
I wanted to swipe the rose away as violently as possible, but there were prickles sitting again against May's tender skin. Instead, I was careful. I curled my left hand around her fist, keeping it steady, and with my right I pinch the stem between thumb and forefinger. "It's so pretty!" Once I'd extracted it from a grip, I turned and threw it back outside. She let out a startled squeaker protest. The residue was on my fingers now, too. Thin and gritty. It smelled,
but, like someone had mixed in blood with dirt and saltwater and, too strong colon, and it was warm. I wanted to claw it off me with my fingernails. I swung the door shut instead, put the chain back on it, locked it, and grabbed May's hand again. We need to go wash this off. She was looking
up at me with baffled sadness. She couldn't imagine rejecting flowers. She was five. She'd never
been given flowers with an ulterior motive. Kindness hadn't been used as a weapon against her. I told her into the bathroom and made sure she washed her hands as thoroughly as possible, ignoring her complaints. The smell lingered anyway, following me into every room even after I had scrubbed under my nails. "Silly mummy!" May was following me around, too, to make sure I noticed she was offended by my ruthless rose disposal. Maybe she was right. "It would be my flower, too!"
I had experienced second guessing myself. I'd imagine the weirder aspects of the incident. Maybe I hadn't really seen anyone through the people, just dark smudges and grime. The knocking had been something blowing into the door. The voice was just something carried on the wind, and the rose had been knocked off a neighbor's bush and blown through a puddle on the way to the front step. There. The mystery neatly solved. "Silly mummy!" I was scared, though. I was alone with May,
and it had been weird. And the combination of the rose with the figure I thought I'd seen and the whisperer was almost sure I'd heard it freaked me out. There was no one I could call with stories of huge figments wanting to come inside. Figments who left slimy tokens on my doorstep and vanished afterwards. The police would laugh me off the phone. My mother would think I was losing it. She already thought I was prone to overreactions, that nothing was ever really as bad as I made it out to
be. The nice lady next door would tell me every calming explanation I'd already given myself. What I had was my own strength, and that had been historically worthless.
“I spoke to May that evening before bedtime. Remember? No opening any windows? No answering any”
knocking. She looked gravely up at me for a moment. She'd forgotten her salt by then, but not the events which had caused it. "He really wants to come in mummy. He even gave us a flower." She sounded so certain, and a chill went chasing down through my veins. I dropped my knees and grasped her shoulders. May have you been talking to someone? Was he the one at your window? Did you see him? She furrowed her brow. "Of course, you knew him. You said his
name was Mr. Moth." When you were trying to let someone in, I had to consciously try to keep my hands from clenching, and didn't want to hurt her or to make her afraid. That was the thing I wanted least in the world. Was it a man? "He was a person. He said he was cold outside."
“I remembered a finger's twisting at the key to her window. Ice churned in my gut.”
"Did you ever talk to him before that night?" "No." "Okay. I pulled a gently against my chest and wrapped my arms around her. How about you sleep in mummy's room tonight?" She lit up at the thoughts.
"Really?" "Yeah." "Come brush your teeth first." "I did end up calling the police on the
non-emergency number. I told them I thought a man had been trying to get into my house, in with my daughter. No, I couldn't describe him, but big. I'd only glimpsed him.
He had been talking to my five-year-old through a window at night.
it. They said they'd have an officer patrolling nearby. "Who is the father in the picture?" "No.
“A father died before she was a year old. My voice caught, as I said it, the sharp edge of grief”
still audible, which was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. I'd hated him almost before the end." "Sorry to hear that." I bit my lip and shook my head and remembered. I'd told him to leave,
slammed the door in his face and yelled out for him to never come back. He cried. He'd always
been so convincing whenever he cried. It gushed out of him. A great cracking open of vulnerability. No one could feel more than he did about the mistake he made. So it was all right to let him back in then, wasn't it? He changed from the man he was an hour before. The one who held his own infant daughter in the air and shook her, his face unrecognizable with rage. He cried that man away, and when it didn't work for once, when I clenched my jaw and refused to give ground,
when I told him, "If we bother you so much, just leave and don't come back." He'd sworn and threatened
“and pleaded and threatened again, crying through all of it. Each of those selves also lost in”
the flood as they failed to win me over. He'd banged hard on the door for maybe half an hour, screaming at me to open it to make things all right again that he loved us. Then he'd left. Then he'd died before it even finished marshalling his lawyers. The cops didn't need to know about any of that. I tried not to think about it. "Then you have a guy coming around to see you,
maybe casually?" No, no one. I'd always been to a freight, I didn't say. They told me that
an officer would be patrolling and to call again if anything else happened. I wasn't comforted much. I put May to bed. Some of my fear and anxiety must have gotten through to her because she didn't drop immediately off the sleep the way she usually would. She rolled and squirmed into the blanket next to me as I read her a bedtime story. Mr. Bunny hopped through a whole series of milk-atosted
“ventures before she started to drift. Usually, he barely made it through one. I hope she'd be fully”
asleep by the time it got dark and I needed to turn on a bedside lamp to continue reading on my phone. It was only about 8pm, and I had a half-formed plan to force myself to stay awake all night, at visual. I didn't stick. I must have passed out several hours before I typically did. My phone resting on my chest and my reading glasses still perched on the tip of my nose. May worked me up by smacking her palm down on my forehead a few times. I fought to blink awake.
With resignation, I rolled out of bed. My phone slid into the grass between the mattress and the wall, and I was too busy making a grab for my glasses as they fell off my nose to try and catch it. Come on, then. Our upstairs bathroom was right at the top of the staircase, so as I stood outside it, waiting for me to come back out. I was looking down the steps into the dark. I had stopped noticing the lingering smell of the foul liquid, but I realized then that it was
starting to thicken around me again. I sniffed at my fingers, trying to work out if it was coming
from my hands, and then remembered that I had never cleaned up the splashes just inside the door
on the mat. Could it be whafting up to me from there? I'd made sure all the windows were shut, so it surely wasn't coming in from outside. In the bathroom, May was enthusiastically washing our hands, humming to herself and splashing the water about. I had just opened my mouth to call to wear to hurry up when I heard the creek of the stairs. My shoulder blades bumped into the door behind me. I didn't even have time to tell myself that houses made strange noises all the time.
The first flicker of denial had barely ignited before there was the groan of another footstep, then another ascending, fast. With them came the soft sound of weeping. I could see all the way downstairs and there was no one there. Except, a look closer. Puddles of dark liquid pooled on the bare wood of the bottom steps dripping from something invisible, the stink of blood, dirt, clawing, burning in my nose. I kept a baseball bat propped against the wardrobe in my bedroom.
May, don't open the door. Do you hear? Mummy! Keep the door locks, okay? Okay. A wet footprint formed two steps from the top of the stairs. I bolted for the bedroom, catching the door accidentally on my way past so that it slammed shut behind me. My desperate hands were clumsy, and I knocked the bat over with my first grab. This was a mistake. I thought as I scrambled it back. I should never have left my out there.
What if she doesn't listen? What if she opens the door? What if he? It's whatever breaks it down. What if she likes him in? The sweat on my palm made the grip of the bat slick. But my fist was locked
Tight around it that it didn't slide as I ran back to the door.
I heard May's voice. Mummy! I was so terrified by that point that a tone of mild concerns seemed
“surreal. Can I come out? No, say where you are. But my voice was drowned out by the knocking”
which crashed against my bedroom door. Mummy! Mummy! Now she was properly afraid. Like me. Shit! I pushed my way to against the door to keep it closed. It was shuddering from the strength of the knocks, but I noticed that the handle hadn't turned. Maybe the thing outside couldn't get in by itself. Maybe it needed some kind of opening. But I didn't feel like I had any control. The voice was begging, and at another time in another situation I might have been moved to pity.
As it was, I was sickened with fear. My phone was still down the side of the bed.
Out of easy reach. Tears were starting to blur my vision. I had no idea what to do.
Mummy! She sounded so scared. But not the right to kind of scared. Not the kind in retreat. Not the kind that curled up under the bed until the storm was over. She was frantic with fear.
“I knew my daughter, and I knew that when she felt like that, she'd run into traffic to get back to my”
side. She'd open the door. She'd try to make it down the corridor past it. The knocking on my door stopped. Those heavy distinct footsteps leading away. Leading back towards the bathroom, leading to where she'd be standing, her tiny hands curving around the door knob, turning. No! The idea of my daughter getting hurt screamed over any hesitation I might have felt, and I threw my door open with the baseball bat swung up over my shoulder, ready to attack.
I did see the figure this time. If only for a moment, it was huge. It's back bent along the ceiling. Facing away from me. It turned the moment I stepped out. It's face and hands both at I level, and I got a blurred impression of long, reaching fingers and a blazing desperate eye. A halo of fluttering moths around its head. Then I swung the bat down. It didn't hit anything, and I staggered
“forwards through empty air, almost falling. The stink of dirt and blood made my head swim.”
But I realized almost at once that the bathroom door was. After all, still closed. May's voice was calling from behind it. What's happening, Mummy? I'm going to come out. No! She was still safe, for now. I had no time to wait. I ran forward, desperately looking for the hawking outline of the invader. Where was it? What was it? Something heavy slammed into my left side, throwing me against the wall and pinning me there. I jerked the bat around in front
of me reflexively and felt a slight resistance, as though I just dragged it through water. The pressure on my side disappeared, and I stumbled another few steps closer to the bathroom before I saw my attacker flicker back into view at the corner of my eye. This time something inside me crunched, as I was rammed hard onto the ground on my back and vomit burned up my throat. I couldn't see anything through my watering eyes, but I could feel the weight of the thing pressing down on my chest.
Its fingers were scrabbling at my mouth, scraping at my clenched teeth. The voice was triumphant. Something wet was splattering into my face, but I couldn't smell it. Not all I was choking on vomit and the weight on top of me was crushing my lungs. I fought instinctively to keep my teeth clamped together, tossing my head from side to side, trying to dislodge the fingers that were hooked between my lips. They curled tighter. I could feel
points of sharpness pressing against my gums. A thousand miles away, my daughter was crying.
I couldn't keep it up. The burning of my throat finally burst into a cough and a gasp,
and then I was twisting so I could wretch onto the carpet. The fingers clawed deeper into my mouth, the second it opened fully. From blurred second of pain and panic, I felt a claw drag against the back of my throat, and then I bit down as hard as I could. There was a crunch of something solid and a fluid of bitter, rancid liquid, and the creature held. The note of triumphant its voice hadn't been totally faded, but I could hear agony in it too. And then the hand was
yanked back out of my bite range, and the hall was full of silence again. I blinked the blur out of my eyes. I could feel the liquid as it slid down myosophagus, thin, and oily, and revolting, with a sting of salt. But I was too busy sucking air back into worry about it much. The thing was gone. I heard the creek of the bathroom door hinges and felt so hollowed out that I could barely even summon any new fear when make him over to me. She dropped to her knees and threw
arombs around my neck. It hurt, but I gathered her in close. She was whispering over and over again.
Maybe that fervent whisper worked.
reappear that nice. It, he, hasn't come back yet. Neither of us feel safe, though. I think about the
rose that may board inside, and the way it dripped I core onto the welcome mat. I wonder if that
“let him into the house. Then I think about the flow of his blood down my throat. I wonder if”
that let him in deeper still. I've been dreaming of his voice, no longer desolate, but laughing,
still saying let me in. Every time I jerk awake something twists in my belly,
like a hand scratching into the meat inside me, like moths replacing the proverbial butterflies
“fluttering towards the light. Every time I look at May, their wings start to beat, and I”
can fill my face twisting into something unrecognizable, something angry, a voricious, pleading. I wonder how much deeper you can go.
As our stories sink beneath the waves, we claw our way back on to dry land,
join us again next time when we plunge into the chilling depths where water hides its darkest secrets.
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