He stopped, torn with indecision. Better to regret something you did than something you didn’t. This was exactly the sort of thing his father’s advice was best applied to.
“Okay, I’m gonna do it,” he told Ant.
Ant grinned. “I’ll come with you in case she punches your lights out and you need to be dragged home.”
Liam’s stomach was flipflopping by the time he reached the front door and tapped lightly. Ant pressed the doorbell.
“I don’t think she’s in,” Liam said.
“Give her more than two seconds to answer.”
They waited, and the seconds clanged by in Liam’s head. He’d reached eleven when he heard soft footfalls inside the house and glimpsed movement through the small frosted panes.
Madison wrenched the door open and stared at him, frowning. Her expression indicated she was more puzzled than angry. “What?”
Liam couldn’t help noticing the pink pajamas she wore. Pink! He never would have pegged her for pink. She had no black eyeliner on, nor lipstick, and her hair was straggly.
“Uh . . . sorry, did I wake you?”
Her frown deepened. “It’s after ten. You think I’m the type who lies around in bed all day?”
“Well, no, it’s just . . . you look like . . .”
“Look like what?”
Ant turned away. “Loser,” he murmured.
Liam felt his face heating up. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” he finally managed, the words tumbling out. “I shouldn’t have gone through the—well, you know. Not without asking, I mean. You let us in on your secret and I messed up. I’m sorry.”
He paused there, waiting for some sort of reaction.
She stared at him a while longer, pursed her lips, looked off into the distance, looked back at him, glanced at Ant, then sighed. “And now what? You want me to forgive you and invite you along to the next event so you can mess up again?”
“No. I mean, yes, I want you to forgive me. But no to the rest. Well, except the bit about being invited along to the next event. I want that as well. But no to the last bit about messing up.”
“Loser,” Ant murmured again.
Madison folded her arms. “And you promise not to go leaping into gateways without me?”
A ray of hope shone down. “I promise,” Liam agreed.
“Wait, what?” Ant said, spinning around. “Without you? Does that mean you want to leap into one as well?”
She looked away. “I didn’t say that. But . . . maybe.”
Liam and Ant shared an openly happy look. Madison rolled her eyes and pulled the door open. “Go sit. I’ll be down in a minute.”
She left them to find their way past stacks of boxes into the living room as she marched to the staircase and hurried up. Liam found the sofa and parked himself on it while Ant wandered about the room reading labels on the sides of boxes.
“They have a lot of unpacking to do,” he said.
Liam shrugged. “They only moved in yesterday. I reckon most of these boxes are Cody’s toys. I unloaded pretty much all of this stuff from the truck.”
“So this is not your first time in Madison’s living room?” Ant asked, a smile on his face.
Liam frowned. “I’ve been here lots of times. An old lady lived here before. She died about six months ago. I think her and my old granddad had a thing going.”
“Right, but this is Madison’s house now. New ownership. This is where a pretty girl lives, my friend, maybe one of the prettiest in school when she starts there tomorrow—and you’re in her living room.” Ant winked and grinned.
“What are you getting at? No, don’t even bother. Just be quiet before she hears you.”
“Something to brag about at school though, right? When all the football players are crowding around her, and she’s warding them off, you can casually tell her out loud that you’ll pop over to her house later. You might suddenly make a bunch of new friends.”
Liam stared at him. “You’re weird. You think I want friends like that? Ones who want to use me to ask Madison out on a date? I’ll stick with the friends I have, thanks.”
“Me, you mean?”
Before Liam could come up with a suitable retort, Madison came thumping down the stairs. Now she was dressed in black again—slightly different clothes, same color. She’d even thrown on some black eyeliner and lipstick. Liam was amazed. As far as he knew, it wasn’t possible for girls to dress that quickly.
“Did you stop time?” he asked her. “Or do you have a twin?”
She looked mystified. “Huh?”
“Never mind. What’s that?” Liam pointed at the book in her hand.
Madison threw herself onto the sofa next to Liam and waved for Ant to join them. “This is my journal. When I first started sleep writing, I just stacked the messages in a drawer. Then I bought a journal and copied them into it. I keep it updated and add notes as I go along. See? Each page is an event.”
She flipped through it. Her neat, large handwriting covered the first few pages. Liam desperately wanted to snatch the journal from her hands and read every word.
“I’ve got eleven messages so far,” Madison said. “Twelve if you include this.” She pulled out a folded sheet from the back of the book. “This one isn’t like the rest. It . . . well, look for yourself.”
She spread the paper open. Liam and Ant leaned in to read it.
Trust the boy next door.
Liam felt an odd chill. “Whoa. Is that . . . is that supposed to be me? But—”
“Weird, right?” Madison said, folding the paper and slipping it back into place. “I wrote it a few days before I moved to Brockridge. Didn’t make sense at the time, but it did once I got here.” She gazed sideways at him. “That’s why I let you in on my secret, Liam. My messages have been accurate so far. I’m just hoping it wasn’t bad advice.”
“It wasn’t,” he whispered.
She resumed her task of flipping through the book. “Anyway, the rest of the messages follow a pattern: a time and a place. Here’s the cemetery message.”
She showed them the entry: 2:11 AM. Cemetery. Judith E. Chambers.
Underneath she’d written the exact date of the event and a description: Three short people with stumpy legs and arms, wearing animal furs. Like alien cavemen only with futuristic gadgets. They all had meters of some sort, maybe to test radiation levels. One had a machine that blasted dirt out of a grave. I’m calling them Rock Dwarves. The new neighbor, Liam, crossed over and returned with alien artifact. Confronted by dwarves and made to swap with different artifact. First contact with people from gateway!
Liam read her entry with a growing sense of joy. There was that pride again! Now it was not just Ant who envied him but Madison as well. At least, that was how he read it.
The entry was brief, but Madison’s writing was quite large and there was no more space on the small page.
“Can I see the other pages?” Liam asked.
She nodded, but instead of handing the journal to him, she turned to the beginning and thumbed through one at a time, slow enough for Liam and Ant to catch bits and pieces:
4:38 AM. Gosford Park. Behind Restrooms. Five really tall women in spacesuits. They looked human but had pale blue skin and long white hair. Called them Hissy Elves because they spent the entire time arguing—
And:
12:02 AM. Jamieson Hwy. North end. Third tree on left. Fifteen ugly green-skinned creatures with tentacles hanging off their chins. No clothes—gross!—just bits of metal armor. Called them Squidheads. They ran around setting up some sort of framework, then rigged a machine in the middle and—
And:
10:11 PM. First Baptist Church. Inside. Couldn’t see much of this one. Peered through windows, saw lights shining, nothing much else. News reports of vandalism the next day. Called these ones Ruiners.
“Wait,” Liam said, reaching out and gripping her wrist before she turn the page again. He quickly let go. “What about calling them Vandals? Sin
ce they vandalized the place?”
Madison continued turning pages. “The Vandals were Germanic people who helped bring down Rome about fifteen hundred years ago. That’s where the word ‘vandalism’ comes from—because they destroyed everything.”
“Right, well, this bunch of aliens vandalized the church. Vandals is a perfect name for them.”
“It’s not fair to keep perpetuating the myth that the poor Vandals destroyed everything they saw. Anyway, I already wrote Ruiners.”
5:34 AM. Blue Holt Lane. Cow field. Hard to predict where in the field this event would occur but easy to spot when it happened. Lots of thin, large-headed children running around with a taller adult watching them. Field trip? I called them Greys because they looked like the classic flying saucer aliens from Roswell in Nevada.
Liam grinned at that one. Madison was as much a nerd as he was, if not more so. A history buff and an alien encounter nut. Perfect.
She flipped through the rest of the pages too fast for Liam to keep up, but he saw that each entry had an exact date spaced about a week apart and leading up to the previous night’s event. Eleven events over the past two months, so a little more than one a week. The second-to-last entry read:
11:58 PM. Backyard. Behind garage. Tall, thin, two legs, four arms. Horrible. Called them Stick Insects. Worried they showed up so close to the house. Are they onto me? Have they detected that I watch these events?
Ant voiced Liam’s concern. “They showed up outside your house? Seriously?”
Madison nodded and closed her journal. "That was last weekend. Very creepy. I was actually glad to move. Couldn’t have come at a better time.”
“But they moved with you,” Ant said, frowning. “Different aliens but still aliens. They opened a wormhole in the cemetery in the woods nearby.”
“Ah, but you have to understand that these events probably happen everywhere, all the time, maybe dozens a night or more. Statistically, what are the chances of so many happening near my house unless there are literally thousands of events every night all over the world?” She looked sideways from Ant to Liam. “See? This isn’t all of them. I just happen to be aware of some of them, the ones close to my house.”
“But why?” Liam asked. “How?”
“Don’t know.”
She paused for a moment. Her next words sent a shiver of excitement down Liam’s spine.
“What I do know is that I wrote another message in my sleep last night after we got back.”
END OF PART 1
COMING NEXT
“No, no,” Liam moaned as three giant bugs swept him upright with ease. He felt the pressure of at least ten pincerlike paws gripping him. They were rock-solid, their arms like thick steel rods in perfect coordination with each other. He might as well have been clamped to an evil dentist’s moveable, tilting chair the way they turned and lifted him.
A second later, he was slung over a hard, unforgiving shoulder, his upper body free to squirm and twist but his legs held absolutely tight against the alien bug’s chest.
Terror found new levels as he was marched through the woods and back to the lane, two bug-creatures behind and the leader out of sight somewhere ahead. In the background he glimpsed his friends, Ant and Madison, peering around a tree. Their faces were too distant to make out, but Madison had her hands clasped to Ant’s shoulder, a sign of someone struck with fright and indecision.
The tale continues in Aliens on the Lake.
About the Journal
The original novel Sleep Writer started out life as a short story in an anthology. I expanded it into a series of alien events and published the novel in 2014, then wrote two follow-up novels, Robot Blood and Caleb’s World. While these have worked out very well, I couldn’t help thinking each of Madison’s events were rather like episodes of a TV series, short and sweet, with a continuing series arc.
I had these short episodic stories in mind when I worked on the fourth book, Warp Giants. Instead of one long tale, I wrote three novellas—three separate but interconnected stories. I found this format worked perfectly, and from that moment on, I knew what I had to do with the Sleep Writer series going forward. It would become a serialized set of novellas (or short reads, or minibooks), separate but linked episodes like seasons of a TV show.
But before publishing any new novellas, I wanted to transform the original books into the same episodic format. This wasn’t difficult. In fact, the split-points seemed very natural to me. Each of the four books became three parts, thus creating twelve minibooks, each with their own title and cover, as follows:
Parts 1-3 are from Sleep Writer
Parts 4-6 are from Robot Blood
Parts 7-9 are from Caleb’s World
Parts 10-12 are from Warp Giants
Parts 13 onward... are brand new!
The serialized Sleep Writer Journal will be especially suitable for those in the Kindle Unlimited program who pay a monthly subscription for borrowing Kindle books. And each time I put out three new novellas, they can be compiled into a full book for those who still prefer that format and want to buy it outright.
Thank you for reading! Click below for the very latest information about the Sleep Writer Journal:
https://www.thesleepwriter.com
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