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Chapter 1: What themes of solitude are explored in the NoSleep Podcast?
Water. It gives us life. We are drawn to it. Yet it holds immense power over us. It can bring unspeakable horror to the most familiar places.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind 'Phantom Perception' by Jasper Downie?
Your morning shower, a tranquil riverbank, 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. Thank you for joining us for the No Sleep Podcast. I'm your guest host. No, actually, I'm just your host, David Cummings.
Well, the balloons have popped, the streamer's taken down, and the leftover cake has gone stale. Yes, we had a lot of fun celebrating our 15th anniversary, thanks to everyone who made it so special. And there's no sleeping here at the No Sleep Podcast, so we're well into our 16th year as we keep the horror hits coming. Coming. Keep them coming. We'll see you next time.
And speaking of hearing some of our team in special roles, I know many of you will be excited to learn about a new audio project in the works, one that features the talents of many of our No Sleep family. It's called Beck's End, and the Kickstarter campaign has recently launched.
When floodwaters swallow an idyllic Lake District village, a stranded journalist finds herself trapped in a rising tide of fear. Cut off from the outside world, she begins to uncover horrors, both human and biblical, lurking beneath the surface. Beck's End is a folk horror audio drama about isolation, belief, radicalization, and whether redemption is possible.
Beck's End is created by friend of the show, Mark Nixon, of Shadows at the Door Productions, with associate producer, and familiar voice around here, Ash Millman.
Mark describes the inspiration for the show, one that he's been working on for the past 10 years, as a, quote, British take on Salem's Lot meets Rear Window, underpinned by a creeping dread inspired by horror video game Alan Wake, end quote.
Beck's End is fundamentally a folk horror experience, defined by its soundscape and talented genre actors exploring the quiet dread and insidious underbelly of small-town Britain under threat from the paranormal. Now... Let's see, I think I can still remember how to host this show.
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Chapter 3: How does 'Your Dead Mom’s Chocolate Cupcakes' by Laura Kulik address body image issues?
I'm back to doing it all alone. And that seems appropriate. Because, like a lot of people feel, doing things alone can be a nice break from hectic crowds. But when it comes to horror, finding yourself alone in places where you expect others to be can be deeply unsettling. Our tales this week will feature people in far worse positions than merely playing a game of solitaire.
And now it's time to get back in the water as we plunge into the horror of our sleepless tales. In our first tale, we meet June. She's a woman much more comfortable above ground. But when her friend Cat invites her to go caving, she reluctantly agrees.
But in this tale, shared with us by author Jasper Downey, June soon discovers where her fears of spelunking come from and how they're not so unfounded. Performing this tale are Lindsay Russo and Kristen DiMacurio. So keep your wits about you. Stay locked in. You need reality, not phantom perception.
Did you know that when deprived of most or all sensory input, the brain often becomes bored and begins to invent its own? Phantom perception, they call it. When sensory deprivation causes vivid hallucinations, you may hear indistinct whispers in the silence or see faces twist themselves out of the darkness.
Scarier than any horror story or movie, the things your own brain can come up with in the right conditions. The right conditions, like a darkness so complete it seems to have a physical presence. an inky black weight pressing all around, stealing the air from my lungs with its black hole quality. A darkness so complete it could only be achieved under hundreds of feet of solid dirt and stone.
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Chapter 4: What happens in 'Who Will You Be Tonight?' by Tyler John Kasishke?
A natural tomb. I'd never taken to caving like Kat had. She seemed made for the cold, damp, claustrophobic passages, braving every squeeze and forging through unmapped territory with all the confidence of someone who wasn't at risk of never seeing sunlight again with one wrong move. Not me. I had always gotten the sense that the earth wanted me.
That once I was down in that clammy darkness, the stone would scrape and curl around me in a crushing hug, keeping me there forever. I know it was ridiculous, of course. The earth could no more want anything than a stone could move on its own. Still, I felt a palpable sense of relief every time Kat and I reemerged with no more than a few minor scrapes and bangs to speak of.
I was always stuck between gloating, not this time, I got away, you couldn't get me this time, and running with my metaphorical tail between my legs. Why did I keep going if it caused such a strong reaction for me? I guess I always had a hard time saying no to Kat. And I guess I felt I was conquering my fears a little every time I emerged from the ground victorious.
Regardless, I was never exactly excited whenever Kat told me she'd found a new spot for us. She liked to consider herself a bit of an explorer, I suppose. She always wanted to find the passages that were yet unmapped, always wanted to push herself a little further. I personally preferred a nice hike in the woods over being deep in the bowels of the earth with no map.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of 'Where the Ripples Stop' by EB Holloway?
But Kat was my best friend. I would have done anything for her. It still haunts me that despite all my feelings that a dark, claustrophobic end loomed over me at all times, I was the one who made it out that day. I can't help feeling that it should have been me. But maybe I should feel consoled by the fact that she died doing what she loved. At least, I have to hope she died.
Sometimes I have nightmares about crawling in the dark, constantly wet, constantly cold. Sometimes, in these nightmares, a small and delicate scurrying thing runs over my hand. In these nightmares, I bring it to my mouth and there's a sickening crunch. In these nightmares, my body feels sore and weak. It feels realer than I think it should, and I tell myself it doesn't.
I have to hope we both made it out in our own way. The cave was nothing special. I feel it needs a title, something to set it apart from every other hole in the ground we'd explored, but of course it had no name. It still doesn't. Maybe The Cave, capital T, capital C, would do it enough justice.
The entrance was little more than a hole in the ground, and it would have been easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. We, of course, were looking for it.
Chapter 6: How does 'Hades Telegambling Service' by Daniel J. Greene blend horror with gambling?
From the entrance, there was a mild downward slope. Nothing we needed climbing gear for, but we had to watch our steps, sometimes sending a small shower of pebbles and debris rolling ahead out of the beams of our headlamps. It really seemed to be a novice passage at first. As far as we could tell, there were no drop-offs or particularly difficult squeezes.
The walls and ceiling of the cave were a comfortable distance away from most of the excursion, and every so often they would open into a small chamber adorned with stalactites and stalagmites. It was only when Kat decided to turn back for the day that the problem started.
I was following behind her, swinging the beam of my headlamp around slowly as I took in the chamber we were making our way through. There was one thing Kat and I could both appreciate. How absolutely untouched places like this were. That we might be some of the first people to lay eyes on these passages.
Lost as I was in my musings, I didn't notice Kat had stopped in front of me and nearly ran right into her. Everything all right? I was puzzled by her silence and stillness. I would have expected her to say something if she needed a break or wanted to grab a drink from her pack. June, we didn't pass a fork on our way in, did we? The words sent a spear of panic into my gut.
Kat, of course, was still quite calm.
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Chapter 7: What are the connections between the stories in this episode?
Ever the brave and adventurous one, she must have been trying to think rationally. We must have come from one passage and not even noticed that it split off behind us. She gave a nod, causing the circle of light from her headlamp to bob. Yeah, that's it. We'll just, uh... We just have to choose one and see if it looks familiar. Her words didn't convince me.
It sounded like she was trying to convince herself. We were so careful when we explored a new spot. Every fork, every split in the path was dutifully noted and marked. It seemed unthinkable to me that we would have missed something so obvious. But really, what other explanation was there?
Every passage and cavern and tunnel in that cave had been carved by water through the limestone over hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible that a new passage could have popped up over the course of a couple hours. Yeah, we must have missed it. We decided to start with the left fork. Kat led the way still, but she was a little slower now.
I'm sure she didn't want me to see it, but I could tell her steps were more uncertain. We walked in silence, our twin lamps illuminating grimy cave walls that were vaguely damp and covered in fungi that had never before seen light. I half expected it to shrivel away from the beams cutting through the darkness, but like everything else, it was still and silent.
A cave doesn't have a lot of landmarks.
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Chapter 8: What closing thoughts does the host share about the episode's themes?
It was hard to tell if we'd seen this bend, this stalactite, this patch of cave wall before. The walls slowly closed around us as we continued forward, the passage going from spacious to scraping our shoulders with each movement, as though urging us forward. We're back. Kat's steps became a little quicker, a little more confident. The last squeeze was about five minutes before that bend.
Kat threw a grin back at me before the walls forced her to turn sideways in order to continue forward. We're on the right track. Something gnawed at me still, in the pit of my stomach. But I so badly wanted to trust her confidence. She was right, after all. It did seem like a familiar path as I joined Kat in the half-shuffling, half-pulling myself through the squeeze.
None of them had been particularly bad on our way in. Nothing that couldn't be taken care of by sucking in and muscling through it. This time, the relief at finding ourselves back on track seemed to render me a little breathless. The walls pressed in tighter than I remembered as I struggled to get my breathing under control. I imagined, or felt, the walls moving with me.
As I breathed out, the squeeze seemed to become even more constricting. When I tried to suck in a breath, mercifully, the stone drew back to allow it. The rock face felt as rough and unforgiving as always, but yet it seemed to almost flow around my limbs, molding around my form. I felt a crushing certainty in that moment.
The stone and earth would form around me in a natural sarcophagus, encasing me miles beneath the ground until I wasted away, until my skin sloughed from my bones. And there my bones would remain, grimy and yellow with no sunlight to ever bleach them, until they too broke down and became part of the surrounding earth. Maybe then it would no longer want. It would have.
I almost screamed when a pale hand suddenly thrust into the light of my headlamp, gripping my arm firmly. As I returned to my senses, the rock suddenly seemed not so close to me. Cat pulled and I pushed and the stone wall under my hand seemed spongy for a moment before I was free of the crevice with an almost audible pop. I imagined that it gripped at me, reluctant to let me go.
Something caught my toe as I emerged and sent my head into the cave wall with a smack. My field of view went suddenly dark and I feared for a moment that I had suffered a head injury and lost consciousness. Luckily for me, the grimy white climber's helmet we both wore had saved me from cracking my head open. But my headlamp had taken the brunt of the impact.
I could feel the shattered plastic when I reached for it. Shit. Kat turned me to face her, asking if I was all right, looking me over for scrapes or bruises. Why'd you stop? In the squeeze? It seemed narrower than before. My head was swimming slightly, and I couldn't think of a better way to explain what I'd experienced. I couldn't think of a believable way to explain what I'd experienced.
You must have been panicking still because we thought we were turned around and all that. Yeah, probably. Deep down, I didn't agree. As I followed Kat through the passage, relying on what light came back to me from her lamp, my fear suddenly felt a lot less ridiculous. Of course the earth could want.
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