Long After Dark Read online

  90 minutes. 45 minutes each side.

  Funny thing, time, how it all fit together despite such arbitrary beginnings and endings, the whole of it played out and calculated down to the very second, each breath, every sunset, dream and waking moment designed, the beat of every heart accounted for, each life a preordained piece of a much larger puzzle, a precisely measured unit in the infinite vacuum of space and time.

  Harry cleared his throat, coughed a bit, then hit RECORD and began to speak, relaying everything that had taken place thus far as best he could. He touched on the Kelly situation, but only to the extent that he’d found some of the happenings surrounding his attempts to contact her odd and perhaps somehow loosely related. Otherwise he steered clear of insinuating anything about extramarital affairs and the like. If he needed to include that at some point in his chronicle of what was taking place he’d do so, but not unless it became integral to the bigger picture. As he spoke into the small recorder he struggled to remember each detail and every nuance regarding the bizarre things taking place, and the longer he spoke the more difficult it became to enunciate and speak not only clearly, but coherently. He covered the odd phone calls, the unusual symbols he’d seen, the coyote, and the strangers. With his gurgling baritone he sounded like a disembodied version of himself, his voice alien and riddled with unusual amounts of emotion.

  Though coughing fits twice caused him to pause the recording, he pressed on until he’d finished, doing his best to focus on facts and keeping personal asides to a minimum. He checked the Dictaphone counter. The entire rundown had taken about ten minutes. He had neither the strength nor the desire to play it back, and he could only hope no one else would ever have to hear it either. But just in case, Harry switched the unit to voice-activated mode so it would automatically begin recording from where he’d left off whenever he (or anyone else) said anything audible. He set it on the table next to the laptop, then did his best to shake off the fatigue and make another quick inspection of the windows.

  “Probably sounded completely insane,” he grumbled, eyes moving from rain-blurred window to rain-blurred window, tracing each shadow, studying each dark corner, the stairs and what little he could see of the house beyond.

  Satisfied all was quiet at least for now, he refocused on the website.

  Head spinning, fever lower but still lingering, and exhaustion attempting to drag him down to sleep, Harry worked by rote, fingers surprisingly deft as he swept through the information on the site, his tired eyes and sluggish brain doing their best to keep pace. After surfing the site awhile, he settled on one group of experiments that had taken place in the late 1960s involving inmates from an array of maximum security prisons that had “volunteered” to be transferred to a government mental health facility where they would become test subjects for advanced sleep deprivation studies.

  “…As expected, when a subject’s normal sleep cycle is consistently interrupted or missed entirely, their minds tire and cease performing normally. As the brain does not regenerate properly when deprived of sleep, the parts of the brain that manage and manipulate memory, language, the ability to prepare and plan, and the basic sense and understanding of time are all severely affected…This was the case in all tested subjects, as was increased appetite. Test subjects were given whatever they requested to eat and drink, with no limits placed on quantity or reasonable availability. As a result, caloric intake increased exponentially, and insulin and blood sugar levels of the test subjects became elevated to levels mirroring those of typical Type II diabetics…”

  Harry slid the mouse down to the next paragraph.

  “…After subjects were kept in a sustained state of wakefulness for a minimum of 15 hours, the effects on the brain became remarkably similar to the effect of alcohol consumption. By the 20-hour mark the effect on the brain of nearly all subjects was equal to those produced by the consumption of at least three alcoholic beverages. Subjects also experienced great difficulty responding to quickly changing situations and found making generally rational judgments far more difficult than they had only hours before...”

  Harry looked at a series of grainy black and white photos scattered throughout the site that showed various men in an institutional setting. Often strapped to beds, their heads and upper bodies were fitted with various electrodes and wires. One young man in particular looked up at him through the screen, a ghost frozen in time, the uncertainty in his eyes flirting with terror…his expression oddly familiar. So lost…so…hopeless…

  “…Sleep deprivation as torture was also studied in select volunteer subjects. Results varied as to its effectiveness, but all subjects consistently experienced blurred vision, slurred speech, memory lapses, confusion, poor judgment, nausea, heightened levels of agitation, fear and paranoia, unbridled emotion (studies have shown the emotional centers of the brain are 60-70% more reactive in subjects suffering from sleep deprivation), visual and auditory hallucinations, temporary psychosis, and in one case, permanent psychosis. Sustained sleep deprivation beyond the introduction of psychosis has led to death in lab animals and would certainly lead to death in human beings. As an interesting sidebar, numerous clinical studies have conclusively shown that some form of consistent sleep interruption and/or disturbance occurs in nearly all psychiatric disorders. These findings, coupled with the results of this and numerous similar studies, illustrate the importance of further investigation into the connections between sleep and mental illness...”

  Although he’d already scrolled well past the photograph, the young man’s face refused to leave him. Harry wondered if the man was still alive. He’d be much older now. Maybe he had children of his own, a life and a partner that loved him. Or maybe he’d died deep in the bowels of some military hospital or government medical center. Maybe he was still there, strapped to a bed or wandering the halls at night, unable to sleep even now, a hopeless shell, medicated and shuffling mindlessly along dark corridors, forgotten and alone.

  Or had those thoughts become confused and merged with the memories from his nightmares? Hadn’t they involved a labyrinth of dark corridors as well, a series of hallways that very easily could’ve belonged to an institution or hospital of some kind? In the dreams he remembered the strange disfigured and bandaged figure, being lost in those hallways…and then the moon hanging above him in the black sky, a silent witness to those pursuing him, its pockmarked surface barren and gazing down at him like a cold, long-dead deity.

  And pain…there was pain too.

  The cordless phone began to ring.

  Startled, Harry grabbed it and saw Kenny’s number scroll across the ID. For a moment he considered letting it go to voicemail but the idea of connecting with someone just then was comforting. “Kenny?”

  “Harry, you need to stop, OK?”

  The minute he heard his friend’s voice he knew something was wrong. Kenny rarely sounded angry, but there was no mistaking his tone. “What?”

  “Come on, you’re killing me here. You need to stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve called me six times in the last ten minutes.”

  Harry hesitated, unsure if he’d heard him correctly. “What?”

  “The phone calls need to stop right now. I’m serious.”

  “Kenny, I haven’t called you since this morning.”

  “You know how pissed Rhonda gets if anything interrupts our family time on Saturdays.” He purposely muffled his voice so his wife wouldn’t hear. “You can’t keep calling or I swear to God she’s going to blow a clot. And what’s with all the crazy babbling? You weren’t making any sense. The last time I’m not even sure you were speaking English.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand it’s annoying the hell out of Rhonda and making it really difficult for me to defend you, not to mention it’s frigging creepy.”

  Harry ran a hand through his hair. It
came back sticky and damp with perspiration. “Listen to me. I’ve been getting calls from someone who sounds like me too and—”

  “If your goal is to make me seriously concerned about the state of your mental health right now, mission accomplished, OK?”

  “Kenny I’m trying to tell you I’ve been getting the same calls.”

  “Do I need to come over there and take you to the hospital or what?”

  “I don’t understand it myself and I know it sounds crazy, but the voice only sounds like mine. I swear to you it’s not me.”

  Kenny let loose a halfhearted laugh. “Right, of course, it’s someone who sounds like you, I get it. So anyway here’s the thing. You’re delirious with fever and exhaustion. You must be coming in and out of it and not even realizing half the things you’re doing or saying. Please tell me you’re not using the stove.”

  Something drew Harry’s attention to the stairs. Had a shadow just moved across them or was it only night drifting through the windows?

  “Harry I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”

  “Sorry, I…”

  “Just go to sleep. Why are you even still up? You haven’t slept in three days. Take the damn cough syrup already. Wasn’t that the whole point of getting the codeine in the first place? Take it and go to bed. You’ll wake up in the morning feeling better and with a much clearer mind, I promise. Come on, this isn’t that complicated. What are you, twelve?”

  “I can’t sleep.” Harry checked the bay window. Just rain. “Not now.”

  “Have you even tried? Take the cough syrup and go lie down. If you still can’t sleep call your doctor back and find out if he can do anything else for you. I’ll make another drugstore run if need be but otherwise or unless it’s an emergency don’t call again, all right?”

  “I didn’t make those calls! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! The same thing’s happening to me!”

  “Hey, thanks for screaming directly into the phone, doesn’t make me want to hang up on you at all.”

  “Kenny…” Frustration strangled Harry to silence. He already knew it was futile but the words left him anyway. “The craziest things are happening and I think I might be on to—”

  “Right, the coyote and all that, I know. We already went over this when I was there. Which you’d remember if you’d slept in the last seventy-two hours.”

  Another rush of cold washed over him, this time deadening his emotions as well. “Yeah,” Harry answered softly, “you’re right. I’ll go to bed now.”

  “Good.” Kenny covered the phone, muttered something unintelligible, then came back on the line. “Get some sleep and I’ll check in on you in the morning.”

  Before Harry could respond Kenny hung up.

  The house creaked and shifted, doing its best to ward off the rain.

  Harry put the phone aside. Whoever or whatever had made the harassing calls had also made them to Kenny, so now it had gone beyond him and had now touched others. But why? He wondered if it had happened to anyone else he knew. If so it was only a matter of time before other friends and colleagues started calling and complaining about nonsensical calls he hadn’t made. If nothing else, there was no longer any reason to question the reality of the strange calls or his interpretation of them. They had happened, and exactly as he’d experienced them. But rather than feeling vindicated the knowledge left him more horrified and confused than ever.

  Unless…

  Could he have made the calls without even realizing it?

  No. Bullshit.

  The den darkened, the walls absorbing night as a peculiarly long shadow glided across the floor. He followed it to the bay window. Telephone wires along the street and coming off the house were barely discernable in the rain and remnants of dusky light. Yet they were unavoidable—black vines everywhere he looked—alive, ominous and threatening. There were telephone poles and endless networks of wires overhead everywhere, but how often did anyone truly see them? Normally the human mind had a curious way of editing such things out, but apparently Harry no longer possessed those filters.

  The world was a very different place once you took the time to notice it.

  Harry knew that turning lights on inside the house would make it easier for someone outside to see in and harder for him to see out, so he left them off. The only illumination came from his laptop, which cut a swathe through the increasing darkness.

  He returned his attention to the computer screen and scanned several pages until he came across a section dealing with hallucinations in test subjects.

  “…as sleep deprivation continued well beyond the 15-hour mark the activity patterns in the brains of test subjects changed more profoundly. The patterns indicated subjects had regressed to more primitive brain function, and as a result, found it increasingly difficult to control emotions and to experience them in logical context…The amygdala, a mass of gray matter in the temporal lobe containing short-term memories and believed to control emotion, also serves as an alarm for the brain when faced with dangers it needs protection from. In the test subjects’ brains, this alarm function became so accelerated the prefrontal cortex ceased activity, making reason irrelevant while prohibiting the brain’s ability to logically assess threat levels. This resulted in vast confusion and uncertainty when subjects’ brains attempted to interpret the appropriateness of the fight-or-flight response…In most cases, the subjects had a difficult time discerning a difference between real and imagined dangers, more-often-than-not lumping them all into the former category rather than the latter…As one example, when test subjects that had endured more than 24-48 hours of sleep deprivation were shown a slideshow of graphically violent images from several Hollywood films their brains were unable to process the information properly. Normally, the Amygdala would alert the brain that the images were not real and therefore nothing to fear. Instead, the test subjects’ brains connected with the locus coeruleus, a nucleus in the brain stem concerned with responses to stress and panic, which produces noradrenalin designed to defend against threats to survival. With its release, the subject felt a heightened sense of threat and danger, along with the need to summon the fight-or-flight reflex in situations the brain would normally define, understand and dismiss…Combined with both visual and auditory hallucinations, which began in most of the test subjects at this point, the result was an unpredictable subject running on raw, unrestrained and irrational emotion. Primarily fear…”

  Harry looked up from the screen. Something had changed. He listened. The rain, it had stopped. Only the wind remained, and it too was weakening.

  The storm was dying.

  “…Many subjects began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations that were quite vivid and detailed…several reported hearing disembodied voices, whispers, voices in their heads, strange sounds they could not identify and sounds that occurred out of synch (such as telephones ringing when they were not, radios playing when they were shut off, etc.)…Nearly all the test subjects reported ‘seeing’ dark figures or blurs along the edges of their peripheral vision as well. In some cases these mysterious figures (which were consistently described as human or humanlike) were stationary, while in other cases they were moving, drifting past the field of vision, sometimes sluggishly, sometimes rapidly…As the state of wakefulness continued, many subjects began to ‘see’ these figures beyond their peripheral vision as well, and some believed they were interacting with them in various ways…With few exceptions, all subjects who experienced this were terrified by what they were seeing and hearing, and wanted desperately to get away from these things…To the subjects these hallucinations were appallingly real, and tests revealed that those suffering from massive amounts of sleep deprivation consistently ‘saw,’ ‘heard’ and experienced things others did not (or perhaps could not)…Because so many physical changes take place to human beings exposed to extended periods of sleep deprivation, not only in the brain but throughout the entire body, further studies were conducted on a select group o
f highly volatile subjects to determine if their eyes were functioning abnormally or differently, and to determine if the literal physiology of the eye became altered under such extreme circumstances…”

  Night had fallen; Harry could feel it moving through him. He forced a swallow down his dry and scratchy throat, considering the information before him. Prior to reading this material he was so sure he wasn’t imagining any of this. Now he had no choice but to at least consider it. Was this all real or just his brain going off the rails, debilitated by sleep deprivation?

  “…Further tests were conducted to determine if severely sleep deprived subjects were able to see beyond the usual spectrum of light human beings are normally capable of perceiving. Results were inconclusive, and stressed subjects to dangerous levels of psychosis and physical fatigue that in several cases nearly resulted in death…While studies indicated the human eye and human vision in general might be affected to the point of altering not only what the subject sees but how they see and the extent to which they see, nothing definitive was established in these areas…Many animals are capable of seeing well beyond the limited range human beings are able to, and it is suspected that humans subjected to extreme cases of sleep deprivation may experience ocular changes capable of allowing them to see a wider range of the spectrum than is normally possible, perhaps including segments of ultraviolet and infrared light…Certainly there are large segments of ‘reality’ human beings cannot see with the naked eye. But the question remains, does this strictly include such things as radio and microwaves, or living organisms—both known and unknown—as well?”

  Harry rubbed his eyes, blinked until his vision cleared a bit. Was that it? Had the lack of sleep not only altered his consciousness but also the literal physiology of his eyes? Were the things he’d seen not hallucinations at all but rather segments of reality that until then had been concealed beyond the range of normal human vision?