Feed Drop - The Sleep Wake Cycle

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Good evening, gentlemen and gentle ladies of hell.

First and foremost, thank you for tuning in.

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Greetings, gentlemen and gentle ladies from hell.

If you're enjoying our show, we think you might enjoy another one of our offerings, the Sleep Wake Cycle.

The Sleep Wake Cycle is an audio drama podcast blending supernatural horror with noir and dark fantasy.

Born during the night plague of 1983, the Stroud twins have been reunited after a lifetime apart, their way forward lit by dimmest foxfire.

Known as the Dreamcatcher and the Insomniac, the twins possess strange abilities, making them uniquely suited to their role as investigators for the Esoterium, a clandestine agency bent on restoring a republic ravaged by the Great Darkness of 1999.

Confronting the Strouds is a world forsaken of sanity, where coffins oft become cocoons, shadows rise against the sun, and reality is just the husk that dreams have left behind.

Be sure to check out the Sleep Wake Cycle on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.

And please, enjoy the episode.

Old towns and countrysides are like seasons of the road, one passing away at the approach of the next.

The transition between the two was almost seamless.

Rolling thickets melted into crooked fences and tumbled-down barns.

Dusty roads gradually put on the grayed, cracked pavement of old places.

Then the scenery reversed course, and the whole thing started over again.

The dawn broke behind the crumbling paper mill as I finally pulled my car off the road, having nearly passed through more seasons than I had gas to get back with.

The dramatic backlighting made the place seem special.

The only abandoned building in the world.

The thing was precisely in the middle of nowhere, just a wooden husk stretched out in an overgrown field.

The warm breeze sent little waves rippling through the tall switchgrass, and the cicadas were just taking over for the crickets, their metallic drone replacing the night singer's previous chirping.

The sky was clear but for a few ambling clouds, and the mill's jet shadow splashed over the tips of my shoes.

I had no choice but to come here.

The people at Nighthand signed my checks, among other things.

They've been more or less steering my life since the day they found me, nestled up to the corpse of my mother in that dump on Silk Street.

Nighthand was one of God knows how many secretive orders within the larger clandestine organization called the Esoterium.

The latter tended to run things, like the entire country.

secretly, below board.

I had no idea what kind of handler would meet me, to sound me out on yet another job, what serial-killing lunatic I'd be hunting next.

The transition between the inside and the outside of the mill was anything but subtle.

The darkness seized me, and my hackles rose accordingly.

Sure, it was only a meeting.

But I'd grown too accustomed to ambushes to ever let my guard down.

I was surprised at how well the place sealed in the dark.

A place that old and ruined shouldn't have been so fortified against daylight.

But I guessed the building had been chosen for a reason, and likely not a pleasant one.

I slipped through the hallways and up the crumbling staircase, choosing to wait in a small room off the middle of the corridor.

I wanted space between me and my handler, so I had time to hear them coming.

Closing the door, I took a seat on the folding chair I found leaning against the wall.

I knew they'd find me wherever I went, and it likely wouldn't take long.

Not five minutes into my vigil, I heard movement from below.

A slow, shuffling gait, plodding through the dark, up the stairs, down the hall, and right up to the door in front of me.

The handler waited there a few long seconds, breathing hoarsely, almost menacingly.

These guys were always a bunch of ghosts.

You never got to see them clearly, and they generally spoke in circles.

But I guess that was the point.

To keep us hunters in the dark.

Feeling watched, uncertain of precisely who or what was pulling our strings.

Finally opening the door, a tall black-suited man appeared.

He might have been painted onto the darkness, his dimensions unnaturally flat.

His face didn't seem quite right either.

Maybe a mask.

His strangeness was par for the course for these guys.

He stood completely still, no breath moving his chest.

From behind, a freak ray of sunlight pushed his shadow across the threshold.

We want to be a nation of laws again, Isaiah.

His His voice was soft but powerful, the concluding notes of a storm.

We believe the time has come for a proper reclamation of the country.

The process will undoubtedly be long and difficult

and painful.

His voice seemed to come from somewhere behind him, and while I could feel eyes on me, I was fairly certain they weren't his.

Perhaps sensing that I was adding things up, he tilted his head and fell into a pensive, almost accusative silence.

After a moment of this, he began again.

You've been doing the nighthand proud, I've heard.

Single-handedly brought in more than a dozen exopsychotics.

I could feel eyes moving over my briefcase and what it contained.

But they had given me.

Even put a few down, from what I understand.

He paused as if to give me a chance to expound on the details.

Brag a little, maybe.

I didn't.

He took my silence and stride, muttering, That's good.

Real good.

Cigarette in hand, though I never saw him light one up, he continued his pitch as a cloud of smoke explored the room.

A job's come up, and we thought of you.

You and your budding career.

As problem solver.

This decision comes with its own share of

His eyes behind the carcinogenic fog had a mindless shine to them.

They looked like glass, but it was hard to tell beneath all the shadow and smoke.

Another silence.

He wasn't going to let up, determined to get me to say something.

I took a deep breath, the kind that said I was willing to play along, but didn't appreciate the manufactured drama.

Sure, just give me their name and I'll start right away.

The light light of the room seemed to dim.

The sound of moth wings played at my ear for a split second.

The man moved closer to the doorway, the shadow over his face deepening, obliterating any suggestion of features.

We have something a little different in mind, this time.

No more super-lunatics forcing their exopsychosis upon the world.

You see, before we can begin to reclaim the country, we must first effect some cleaning.

Naturally, there will be some holdouts concerning the future we envision.

Some may even prefer we revert to the naked barbarism of the Great Darkness.

So, this being the case, it's been determined that the first step towards this brighter future is to assess the wellness of our republic.

Seek out that which ails it.

We'd like this to be your area.

Despite being closer, his volume hadn't changed.

His voice still came from behind.

He inflicted one last, unrelenting silence.

Nodding as if I found the idea agreeable, I replied in a dutiful tone.

Well,

sounds like a fine plan.

When do I start?

He receded into the hallway, the darkness erasing him.

We'll be in touch.

On the way back to my apartment, I drove past a mob of dark callers, all of them clad entirely in black and chanting about the next Great Darkness.

Over 20 years out from the horrors of the Great Darkness of 1999, and the neo-Noctom set had finally achieved real political traction.

penetrating social strata that most often excluded the lunatic fringe.

Now we got noxite mayors, heckin' cathedrals, God-fled lobbyists.

I'd been told by those whose business it was to know better than me that the situation was only likely to get worse.

I was one of the few persons who remember the darkness.

It wasn't the party these nutjobs think it was.

That said, it was where I got my first taste of dreaming.

Or maybe just nightmaring.

Either way, the world, if not the universe itself, had gone soft in the attic, Psychosis replacing physics.

Most people only got to see what happened after it all ended.

The debris of depravity.

They'd blacked it all out.

The entire year of darkness.

Forgot who the upside-down cities were built for, or the mountains of blackest anthracite rose out of.

Why human bones were used in the construction of wicked statues that rose thousands of feet into the sky.

and the billions, if not trillions, of other perversions of man and nature.

And that wasn't counting the other stuff.

What even the most insane human being couldn't get up to.

The stuff beyond nature.

Regardless of how hard the scientists tried to prove otherwise.

Nah, the Great Darkness wasn't just a year of madness brought on by some one-of-a-kind solar event.

EM fields flung out from a sun in flux.

driving everyone insane, causing amnesia after the fact.

Sure, we all ran amok, and then some.

But at the end of the day, it sure as hell wasn't our party.

I think deep down we all knew that.

After the survivors snapped out of their insanity, most of them anyway, they just roamed the ruins, gawking at the newest apocalypse, having no idea how or why it had all happened.

But not me.

I was there, wide-eyed and awake.

What I saw was molten reality, heaven and hell all blended together.

It was as beautiful as it was terrible.

Still, I can't say that I found the whole thing unlikable.

A part of me felt home.

Once I'd crossed the bridge to the north side of Silverton, I started to feel the limits of my medication.

I couldn't stop looking down from the road, counting to three before looking up again.

My driving erratic and dangerous for the fact.

My doctors said it was caused by my rather unique condition, my version of insomnia, tics, obsessions, and ridiculous rituals that could overwhelm me if I wasn't careful.

By the time I pulled up to my house, the sun was in full view, finally sneaking past the gaggle of clouds that had kept in step with it most of the day.

I saw it rise and fall with no interruption.

Same for the moon.

Just different sides of the same light in the sky.

The charnel star, rising in fire, and dying pale and dim at night.

It was just one of a million weird things you you thought of when your mind never winded down.

Ever.

There was no end to me, just like that light in the sky.

I moved in one never-ending, seemingly pointless circle.

The closest I came to shutting down was whenever I became lost in a thought, holding it up to the night sky or against a sunny meadow somewhere.

My eyes lost focus as my mind detached from the moment.

But the squawk of a bird, snap of a twig, shift in the wind, and bam, I was back again.

I wondered if this desire I had to shut down was what other people felt when they needed to sleep.

I doubted it, though.

It wasn't fatigue, which I understood to be one of the major reasons people conk out.

When I ran out of juice, I just sat down and collected myself, letting my body recharge.

No, what I felt was the want, if not the need, to shut out the world, let my mind sink away.

I could think of a few exos who had come close to granting my wish.

But so far, no dice.

The house I stayed at was just a place I put my stuff between jobs.

I never had a home, as I understood the concept.

I'd been too busy hunting lunatics all my life.

such as it was.

I did it because I couldn't do anything else.

My assignments had become the dreams I can't biologically experience.

My personal escape from reality.

It sounded like hyperbole, but it was more likely understatement.

The people I hunted, if that's what they still were, could slip past reality itself.

Literally.

They were like monsters whipped up from a child's nightmare.

Naturally, no one was going to read that scoop in the paper.

Everyone in the know has been trying for years to keep the lid on that saucepan.

Besides, they've got me to keep the pot from boiling over.

When the post-darkness homicidal lunatics were first discovered, the experts called their knack for infecting the world with their flavor of madness, neopsychosis, a brand new type of violent insanity.

But after the lab coats finished breaking down the whole thing, they gave the condition a new tag, exopsychosis, as in, an insanity that can affect the world around the sufferer.

Suffice to say, the whole whole changing reality to fit their crazy view of things made my catching them a little more difficult.

Yet while the Exos had their way with the new reality of things, I got my own tricks.

Whatever happened to me during the night plague of New Victoria, back in 83, I was born with my own peculiar set of aptitudes, not least of which was my resistance to the reality-warping antics of the Exos.

or really anything that tried to buck the Newtonian order of things, especially during the day.

I was the wet blanket to the Exo's pajama party.

But for me, it's become a release, I suppose.

Stepping beyond the monotonous cycle of day and night to chase boogeymen.

Occasionally I caught one.

Sometimes, I did more than catch them.

If they had it coming, and if death had any sway over them.

My meeting with the handler had me scrambling for perspective.

Could this new job be a vacation of sorts?

A break from staying one step ahead of superhuman killers?

I wasn't sure people like me could take vacations.

The idea of forgetting your worries and whatnot.

When I stepped into an abandoned basement or twilight thicket, an exopsychotic hiding in the shadows, twisting their mustache like they could twist reality.

That was when the solid world vanished, and I got my turn to dream.

Everything else was just a long day.

My house was divided between several studies, though I preferred the older term, den.

Each den was designed to cater to some interest or other I'd picked up along the way.

It was one of the upshots of not needing a bedroom.

Every relocation got the same treatment.

Bed and nightstands went to the curb, and I moved in a small fleet of brand new desks, bookshelves, reading lamps, and whatever else helped me fill a desired purpose.

This part of my moving-in ritual also gave me something to do with all the money they gave me, as I tended to splurge on a lot of antiques and such, to say nothing of my cars.

In strict accordance with my mental infirmities, obsessive compulsiveness to be specific, I had to move in at night, and nothing could touch the walls as I brought stuff in.

If something did hit a wall, I was forced to strongly suspect that my next manhunt would be my last.

In other words, I was utterly convinced of it.

The only way of shaking these doomsday prophecies was to wear grey the following day.

Some of my furniture could be pretty awkward to heft upstairs and down long hallways, but I got about a dozen or so grey suits dry-cleaned and ready to go.

Recently, I'd been trying to write poetry.

Again, it was my quest for abstraction I think I was missing from all my sleepless wanderings.

It was hard to believe that dreams even happened.

A completely different reality that lurked behind sleep.

If so many people didn't insist it was real, I'd be forced to consider the whole thing a great big pile of bullshit.

Apart from analogizing it to the raptures of the Great Darkness, I'd read a lot about what it was like to dream.

And to me, it sounded like strolling around a poem.

I'd been struggling with the mechanics of writing the things.

But I thought I was starting to get the hang of it.

Making dreams out of paper and ink.

Meaning emerging from nonsense, despite or because of the chaos of wordplay.

Honestly, I couldn't see how that process differed much from being awake, but what the hell did I know?

I haven't slept a day in my life.

It was about 4 a.m.

when someone slipped a note through the mail slot.

I knew before the whisper of paper had settled into silence that I'd been given my next instructions.

While my job supplied me with more than my share of mystery, I had never been given a piece of paper that contained more than the name of my next target.

This one was practically a novel by comparison.

It read, At midnight tomorrow, meet an old friend for coffee at Chris's diner.

They'll be in the booth at the end.

Cheers.

Management.

I thought the directions more than a little odd.

I'd never been asked to to meet anyone before, let alone an old friend.

And I don't drink coffee.

A Sleep Wake Cycle is Meltopia production.

Today's episode was written and performed by Mark Ansloan and edited by Walker Kornfeld.

Sound production and editing was performed by Stephen Ansloan, and the Sleep Wake Cycle theme song was written and performed by Sean Zeller.

Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Meltopia.

That's M-A-E-L-T-O-P-I-A.

And if you'd like to know more about the world of the Sleep Wake Cycle and contribute to its nightmarish expansion, visit us at www.patreon.com forward slash Meltopia, where you can gain access to all sorts of art, mythology, stories, and more.

For more information about the sleep-wake cycle and the larger world of Meltopia, head over to meltopia.com.

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