The Somnolence Hour

The day after the alley killing, the Bureau's Director shows Solomon Graith a photograph from 1905 of a dead man posed exactly the same way.

It's late, and the building has gone quiet over their heads. Director Hallowell finishes his cigarette before he turns the photograph around, and Graith doesn't need a protractor to see it. The man in it is sitting against a wall, and everything is exactly where it was on Radcliffe Street, put there by somebody who knew where it went. Someone wrote "Victim prepared as vessel" across the back a long time ago, and the file doesn't say who.

Hallowell has been at the Bureau for thirty years, twenty-three of them as Director. He names four states, Ohio, Louisiana, Maine and Nevada, and says the file starts with this photograph. The name The Hollow Ones first turns up in Bureau files in 1972, and before that, Hallowell says, there was a case out of Prague and fragments of European folklore from the 1600s. When Graith says cults don't last that long, Hallowell tells him it isn't a cult, it's a lineage, and that they don't just kill, they consume. Graith asks him for people and gets told no, and when he asks about the agents who had this case before him, Hallowell tells him to read the boxes.

That morning, his handler Briggs gave him a slip the Director had signed for the archive and told him Maren Voss would be in at seven on Saturday, because she's always in at seven. She's already there when Graith gets down to the lowest level on Saturday morning, and she brings out three boxes that go back about a century. Nobody asks for these, she tells him. He says he's asking, and she says she'll need them back by five.

Inside are the Bureau's old cycle maps. The way the files tell it, the killings start in one city every twenty to thirty years, spiral in on one point, and then stop for decades, and if that's right, the alley is out on the edge of a new one. At the back of the last box are the files on the four agents who worked this case before him, and every one of them ends on the same line: Agent removed from duty. Cause: psychological deterioration. Graith reads the names from left to right, stops at one of them, and sets that folder aside without opening it.

This is the second episode of The Consumed, a serialized horror drama that runs for three seasons. It's one story told in order, so if you're new, start with Episode 1. New episodes every Friday. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones.

The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

A rookie cop finds a dead man posed against an alley wall at three in the morning, and then the dead man breathes.

The call came in as screaming, but by the time Officer Evan Pike gets to the alley behind Radcliffe Street, it's dead quiet. He's eleven weeks into the job. So far that's been four domestics, two fender benders, and a noise complaint about a parrot. Now he's standing in the dark with his flashlight on a man somebody arranged with more care than anyone gives the living, and he's counting the rasps coming up out of the man's throat. He gets to four. The chest never moves once.

When the other units show up, somebody calls a man named Graith, and the officer who smokes his cigarettes in four pulls tells Pike to leave the breathing out of his report.

Solomon Graith used to work homicide. Now he's with the Bureau of Cultural Anomalies, which officially catalogs urban folklore, and he's the man they call when the explanation runs out. He takes a protractor to the body and gets the same angle at both shoulders, down to the degree. When one of the officers asks what kind of psycho does that, Graith tells him it isn't a psycho. It's a ritual, and he's seen it before. Then the wind picks up, and Graith hears something in it that the officer standing right next to him doesn't.

Before sunrise, a courier from the Director's office brings him an envelope. Inside are six reports from out of state, all found before tonight, and a note in handwriting he'd hoped he would never see again: They're calling them The Hollow Ones again. Keep it off the books.

This is the first episode of The Consumed, a serialized horror drama that runs for three seasons. It's one story told in order, so start here. New episodes every Friday. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones.

The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

An estate clearance crew is not a dump run. It is a sort — sell, donate, haul, hold for family. Four piles, three days, and a certificate at the end that says the house was left clear and broom clean.   Elias Ruiz is carrying a box down the front steps when the paper in his shirt pocket moves. Not wind. It shifts the way a hand shifts under a blanket, and then it goes warm.   It is a tally sheet in somebody's handwriting, with a number in a ruled box at the bottom, and the ink is wet. There are nine boxes on the truck. The sheet says ten.   Hour two. Ozzie carries an unlisted lamp out to the cab because it is small and he is being efficient. He comes back inside and keeps walking and a minute and a half later he looks down. The middle three fingers of his left hand are not there. No wound, no blood, and the callus on the edge of the new skin is old. His glove has two fingers and the stitching runs clean around where the other three never were.   Elias is thirty-four and owes his brother four thousand dollars. The job pays a thousand a man on completion, cash the same afternoon, and the buyer's agent walks the house Friday at seven in the morning. Until then the money sits in escrow.   The dead woman's sister sits in a lawn chair on the grass by the mailbox for all three days with a thermos of lemonade, and she does not come closer than that. Her sister kept a list her whole life — everything that came into the house and everything that went out of it. The list is still keeping itself. Asked what happened to her sister's husband, she says he put a new sill under that back door in nineteen eighty-one and that he was good with his hands.   The number at the bottom of the sheet is not a score. It is a distance, and it goes down when the work goes well. Every box loaded correctly and written down walks it one door nearer. Finishing the job is what lets it in, and they cannot stop, because the house has to be empty by seven on Friday and nobody has been paid yet.   In the bottom drawer of the sideboard there is a shoebox of old sheets going back decades, the paper gone the color of weak tea. Groceries. A coat in, a coat out. And in the last ruled line of a Thursday in November nineteen eighty-three, in a careful hand that did not shake: one, male, six foot even, one hundred and ninety pounds, out, unlisted. Collected.   There is no name on it. There are no names anywhere on a tally sheet, because a tally sheet does not need one. He is in with the grass seed.   The list was never about objects.   A standalone story. No prior episodes required. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones.   The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark.   Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

A one-to-one sitter watches one patient for twelve hours and does not look away. That is the whole job. She is not allowed to chart, not allowed to hand him a pill, not allowed to take a blood pressure, and not allowed to leave until a nurse comes to relieve her.   At one in the morning, Mister Lund has not blinked in eleven minutes. Bianca knows because she has been counting, one tally mark a minute on the back of her drug cards. She looks up to write down the hour. Two seconds. Three.   When she looks back he is standing at the foot of the bed. He is eighty-one years old and two days post-op and he has not gotten out of that bed on his own since recovery. The rails are still up. The bed alarm has not gone off.   The charge nurse gets him down and then asks the first question, before the alarm, before the line, before anything a nurse is supposed to ask about a confused post-op with a fresh hip. "Did you look away?"   Bianca Estrada is twenty-six and nineteen months from her RN, and she took nights on four-West because a sitter shift is the last job left where somebody pays you to sit in a quiet room with a textbook open. She also owes eleven hundred dollars a month for the overnight on her mother's memory care bed. The overnight is a sitter. A woman in a chair by the window, seven to seven, who is not allowed to look away.   On hour eight she is gone ninety seconds for water. When she comes back his jaw is open past where a jaw opens, and there is a second set of knuckles pressing out through the inside of his cheek, four in a row. They flex. He is still conscious.   Two rooms down, through the open door, something is standing at the foot of another patient's bed. Grey — the grey of a thing that was never colored in. Too much thigh, too much forearm, the whole left side of it flat, like something that set that way over a long time and was never turned.   It does not move while nobody is watching. It comes along the line from a sitter to the patient she is required to look at, it only moves toward the person looking, and it never goes backward. It cannot touch anybody who is being watched. So it stands four feet away in a small room and waits, because she is on her fourth twelve in a row and it has all night.   The whiteboard at the station has two lines for every room. Top line is who is in it. Bottom line is who is watching them. Five rooms, three sitters. A woman in an office in the administration building makes that board, on a Tuesday, off a report, and she has never been on four-West in her life.   A chaplain who has worked nights since nineteen eighty-one hands over a list of three rooms a sitter should refuse. Four-eighteen is not on the list, and the reason is that the list is only rooms you can say no to.   The hospitalist already pulled the numbers. There is no cluster. Statistically, the patients on four-West do fine. It is not the patients.   A standalone story. No prior episodes required. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones.   The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark.   Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

The haunt has nine rooms and the owner can only afford eight actors. So Room Nine never got a theme, or a set, or a person in it — just black walls, a strobe on a timer, a pressure mat under the plywood, and a pneumatic scarecrow that drops when somebody steps on the mat.

At two in the morning, Perla counts her crew out the exit door and gets nine. She counts again and gets eight.

On the floor of Room Nine there is a set of human teeth laid out in the shape of a mouth. She puts a knuckle against a molar to check whether it's resin, because after four seasons she knows what resin feels like. It isn't resin. It's warm.

Perla Quintero is thirty-one, she runs the floor, and this job is nine dollars an hour for twenty-four nights, paid in cash out of the door on Halloween. That's the arrangement, and it's why nobody walks no matter what they're asked to do.

On night three, a woman who has done this haunt every October since it opened goes into Room Nine at the head of the fourth group. Perla gets there in time to see what is left of the arm and not in time for anything else. The county tags the rig out of service. The haunt does not close.

Then a costume comes back to the rack still warm, with the shoulder seams walked open and the sleeves hanging four inches lower than they were cut. The count comes out one high. A scare actor performs his scene twice in one night and remembers doing it once. In Room Seven, a group watches somebody deliver Bobby's line with Bobby's stammer on it, on the right word, while Bobby stands in the dark and listens.

It is moving up the running order. Room Nine, then Room Seven, then the forty feet of corridor everybody has to walk to reach the time clock.

The woman in the box office has worked eleven seasons and will not say what happened in twenty nineteen.

A standalone story. No prior episodes required. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones.

The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

The clock above the register stopped at three thirty-four. Every customer in the room is looking at Sam, and the man at the end of the counter has just told him the thing under the floor is going to ask for his name — through him, because he does not have a choice in it either.

Sam does not say his name. He does not refuse. He picks up the pot and goes back to work.

What follows is twenty-six minutes of a man refusing a question in four different mouths. A state trooper asks the date his father died. A woman waiting on a husband who is not coming asks for his grandmother's middle name. Sam answers none of them. He pours refills. He wipes a booth that does not need wiping. He counts the pie case three times.

The crack in the floor stops at twenty-three inches. Something underneath starts breathing again, slower each time.

Then they start leaving. A dust-covered sedan that has not started in forty years turns over on the first try. A man who never used the door is simply not in his booth. By three fifty-nine the lot is empty gravel — and it has been empty all night, because not one of them ever pulled in.

At four o'clock the OPEN sign clicks off.

Hal Doerring has worked that kitchen for thirty-four years, and he has not sat down.

The Season One finale. Episode 10, Part II of Last Light Diner. Best experienced in order, in the dark, with headphones.

This is the last of Last Light Diner of Season One. Next Friday is a standalone story: Ninth Room.

Last Light Diner is a rules-based horror story set in the high desert of eastern Oregon. A roadside diner that has never closed since 1948. A cook who won't set foot outside. Customers who only come after midnight — and rules, handed down through four generations, that keep something underneath the floor asleep.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

Earl Henton has eaten at the Last Light Diner on Wednesdays since 1975. On Friday he came in without his newspaper, drank one cup of coffee, and shook Sam's hand on the way out. Earl Henton does not shake hands.

An hour later Joe Cabrera showed Sam a photograph of his daughter in a wedding dress and told him to take care of himself. Neither man said why.

At nine forty-seven a trucker came in with no engine sound behind him and no headlights in the lot. He left a sealed envelope Ruth gave him a year back, to be delivered when the diner needed it most. Inside is a brass key an inch and a half long. It fits nothing in the building.

Then the regulars started arriving on the wrong nights. A man who only comes at two in the morning sat down at ten fifteen, soaked through. An officer who only comes on weekdays parked nose-in to the window on a Friday. Three women appeared in booth four without the bell ringing. A woman who comes on Thursdays is in her Thursday seat, and it is Friday, and she does not know it.

Every one of them wants Sam to tell them one thing.

The back door knocks three times at three thirty-three in the morning. Never before, never after. Sam was trained for three.

Tonight it knocked at two fourteen. And it knocked four times.

Part One of the Season One finale. Episode 10 of Last Light Diner. Best experienced in order, in the dark, with headphones.

Last Light Diner is a rules-based horror story set in the high desert of eastern Oregon. A roadside diner that has never closed since 1948. A cook who won't set foot outside. Customers who only come after midnight — and rules, handed down through four generations, that keep something underneath the floor asleep.

New episodes every Friday at 7:00 PM Central.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

Sam Mercer has been reading his grandmother's journal for six weeks, and for six weeks there has been a page missing from it.

It was torn out before he ever got to the diner. Hal read Ruth's last entry once, while she was still alive, and never saw what came after it. All that's left is the stub in the spine and a tear that runs downward, toward the floor.

On Wednesday night at eleven forty-seven the bell rings and two people come in wearing formal wear from a decade Sam can't place. They set a slip on the counter. The slip says AUDIT. They don't sit, don't eat, don't ask for water. They are not, technically, customers. They stand at the end of the counter for forty-eight hours, and the Friday dinner rush walks around them and through them and does not see them at all.

Sam has two days to find the page.

By one in the morning he has emptied every drawer in the office and built a list of nine people and things that could have taken it. Two of the names on that list are people. One of them is Hal.

He never thinks to kneel down.

What's finally on that page is in Ruth's handwriting, written fast, hard enough to crack the paper in three places. And whatever put it back did not come in through the front door.

Episode 9 of Last Light Diner. Best experienced in order, in the dark, with headphones.

Last Light Diner is a rules-based horror story set in the high desert of eastern Oregon. A roadside diner that has never closed since 1948. A cook who won't set foot outside. Customers who only come after midnight — and rules, handed down through four generations, that keep something underneath the floor asleep.

New episodes every Friday at 7:00 PM Central.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

Sam Mercer has been the warden of the Last Light Diner for six weeks. In that time the building has taken from him every way it knows how. It has not once given him anything back.

It is a quiet Wednesday in late October. Earl Henton on his stool at seven. A salesman out of Spokane who took a wrong shortcut looking for Boise and stayed for the soup. The Three Sisters knitting in booth four.

At nine-fifty Hal comes out of the kitchen and tells Sam to get the coffee, because this is going to take a while. He has a cassette in his hand labeled RM 92. He has also brought the cup — the one that sits on the chrome by his elbow every afternoon, that he does not pour, that Sam gave up asking about weeks ago.

Ruth Mercer recorded that tape two days after a man walked into her diner at ten-forty on a Friday night in October of 1992. She had never met him. What she had was a low sign and a look on a man she recognized through the glass. She put on her coat and went out into the parking lot alone. The parking lot is not under the Concord.

What she traded out there is not on the tape. Hal has heard the recording twice in thirty-four years. Tonight is the third time.

The thing she sent away was never destroyed. She bought time, and she told Hal the time would run out, and that she would not be here when it did.

Tonight the neon drops half a step, and something stands at the door that cannot come through it, and asks for the cook.

Episode 8 of Last Light Diner. Best experienced in order, in the dark, with headphones.

Last Light Diner is a rules-based horror story set in the high desert of eastern Oregon. A roadside diner that has never closed since 1947. A cook who won't set foot outside. Customers who only come after midnight — and rules, handed down through four generations, that keep something underneath the floor asleep.

New episodes every Friday at 7:00 PM Central.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.

Sam Mercer has been the warden of the Last Light Diner for five weeks, and the only person who has walked through that door and treated him like a man he would have been outside of it is a trucker named Joe Cabrera.

Joe has been eating patty melts at that counter for ten years. He does not eat the pickle. Hal keeps putting them on there anyway. Tonight Joe does not sit at his stool. He walks past the counter without looking at it, takes a booth, sets his cap brim-down on the table, and lets the food sit in front of him for fourteen minutes without picking up the fork. Sam. I saw something out by my rig. I need to ask you a question.

There is a protocol for this. Ruth Mercer read it into a tape in 1985, her first year behind the counter, and it has three parts and every one of them is a door closing. Give the man a trick of the light and help him carry it home. Let the building take the memory, at a price somebody has to pay. Or bar him from ever coming through that door again.

Hal has the fourth answer and the fourth answer is that there isn't one.

What Sam finally says to Joe is not on any tape. He makes it up at the table, with his friend across from him and the plate going cold between them.

Episode 7 of Last Light Diner. Best experienced in order, in the dark, with headphones.

Last Light Diner is a rules-based horror story set in the high desert of eastern Oregon. A roadside diner that has never closed since 1948. A cook who won't set foot outside. Customers who only come after midnight — and rules, handed down through four generations, that keep something underneath the floor asleep.

New episodes every Friday at 7:00 PM Central.

Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.