Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror

by Saul Tanpepper

  She was determined to make up for it. She decided that she would never again be held hostage by fear.

  Now she carried a whistle around her neck and kept a can of pepper spray and a roll of quarters in each coat pocket. They were easily accessible. When held in the fist, the quarters could double the force of a punch—or so she’d heard. She believed it, anyway, and that was what was important, right? She’d also received lessons in self-defense. She wasn’t going to be taking out any ninjas with her limited skills, but all she needed was a few basic moves, enough to help her take care of business, buy her time, let her escape if necessary. All she needed to know was how to kick and punch and, most importantly, where to land those kicks and punches for maximum effect.

  Staying awake for the entire ride was her biggest concern. It was going to be especially difficult on this trip, since she’d just pulled an all-nighter, cramming until almost four in the morning. She’d tried to sleep after that, to catch a couple hours of shut-eye, but her notes kept her awake, swirling around inside her head like a whirlpool.

  During breakfast, she’d checked to make sure her phone had a good mix of party songs on it. She could listen to that on the train.

  She also had her Angry Zoms game on her phone. Todd had given it to her for Christmas just for such times. It was a great time-killer.

  Six minutes after setting out from her apartment, Ellen pulled into an empty spot in the student lot, placed her permit on the dash, and hurried over to Wilker Hall. Her conversation with Erik was already forgotten, pushed back into the farthest corners of her mind, replaced by thoughts of parapsychoanalytical techniques and famous analysts of the early twenty-first century. It was time to get serious.

  † † †

  Ellen found a seat and busied herself arranging her pencils and eraser on the desk while she waited for the teaching assistant to finish passing out the exam booklets. In the few minutes before the test started, she let her thoughts drift to her fiancé and she smiled. She was anxious to get home and see him again.

  They had met sophomore year of high school while working at a charity function at their church. Todd had asked her out that same day, and Ellen had practically disgraced herself in her mad rush to say yes. In the course of a few hours, she had gone totally head over heels for him. It turned out that the feeling was mutual.

  What had started off as love at first sight for both of them soon became true love. And on the day she left for college, when Todd presented her with an engagement ring (to go along with the Angry Zoms game), true love became the promise of love everlasting. Once more, Ellen was over the moon with happiness. This time, however, she played it cool, letting Todd squirm for a full three minutes before giving him her wholehearted assent.

  They set the date for June the twenty-first, two weeks after the term was supposed to end. At first, Ellen thought a later date might be better—early August, maybe—but Todd finally convinced her to go with June. And now, here it was March already. It hardly seemed real that the wedding could be less than three months away.

  Her parents had been supportive right from the very start, much more than she could have ever hoped for, especially given that they’d always expressed their wish that both children wait a while before committing to married life. “You should get a degree,” they’d told Ellen. “Begin building a career first.” Which was exactly what they had done, delaying marriage and starting a family only when they were already well in their thirties.

  But Ellen didn’t want to wait, not to be married, anyway. Thirties seemed too old, a lifetime away. Besides, why wait a whole decade? She wanted to spend the rest of her life with Todd right now!

  She needn’t have worried about her parents’ opposition to the marriage. They were just as ecstatic to hear the news of their daughter’s engagement as she was in giving it. Like Ellen, they had approved of Todd from the very beginning, whom they considered a serious-minded young man with a promising future (even if they didn’t really understand and couldn’t care less about the type of work he was interested in doing).

  Video games were his passion. He had started working for ArcWare Entertainment while still in high school at sixteen. Now, at nineteen, he was head programmer in a department playfully nicknamed The Graveyard. Zombie-chic was on the rise, and the Undead were infiltrating pop culture more and more. Angry Zoms was just one of the many projects coming out of Todd’s department.

  “What matters to us,” her parents had told the two lovebirds, “is that you two love and respect each other.”

  “We do,” they had both been quick to say.

  “We’ll pay for whatever you want, El,” they told her, only to have her balk. She didn’t want to lose control of the arrangements to her parents. “No conditions,” they added, when she told them this. “We won’t butt in. Promise. You tell us what you want and we’ll make it happen. Nothing but the best for our girl.”

  They had kept their promise, letting her and Todd figure out exactly where and when and how, offering advice only when asked, and trying to be as neutral about things as possible. The guest list, originally numbering about fifty, grew to over three times that figure, and yet her parents uttered not a peep, neither about the growing cost nor about having to change the reception site three times to accommodate the swelling crowd.

  Of course, it helped that Todd was paid very well for his work at ArcWare. And the Previns were already well-to-do and just as willing to pay for arrangements as her parents were. But unlike the Grabowskis, Ellen soon discovered that Previn money came with strings attached. Todd’s mother was very much a hands-on woman, and she couldn’t resist sharing her numerous opinions with anyone who might listen.

  “Lv hr 2 me,” Todd had texted a much distressed Ellen one evening after Mrs. Previn had emailed her a list of photographers that notably excluded the one the betrothed couple had specifically wanted. “Ill deal w/ma.” And, somehow, he had.

  But everything had come to a head with the caterer. After seeing the latest changes to the menu that Mrs. Previn had slipped through, he’d had a meltdown. He threatened to return the Grabowski’s deposit and walk away from the job. It was turning out to be no small matter and was causing some friction between the families. Even, she and Todd had fought about it.

  Ellen finally asked her parents to deal with it, and they were happy to oblige. It was one of the things she was hoping to discuss during the few days she was home. But for now—right now—as she waited in her seat in Wilker Hall, she needed to focus on passing her midterm, so she pushed the thoughts aside.

  “You have three hours to complete the exam,” the test proctor announced. “Please begin.”

  The exam was actually easier than she’d thought it would be. She’d studied all the right material and was satisfied that she’d answered three out of the four essay questions correctly, or at least thoroughly enough to warrant getting nearly full credit.

  The last essay question, however, had been a stickler, having to do cognitive phenomena in post-mortem brains. This was a relatively new area of theoretical parapsychology that blurred the line between science fact and science fiction. The theory was based on recent observation in electrophysiological studies that suggested certain kinds of brain function might continue to persist long after death, functions such as memory and thought. Maybe even emotion. Ellen had always hated science in high school, and so most of this new technology was mumbo jumbo to her. She was only taking the class at the behest of her career counselor.

  The question had asked her to theorize a tool that might enable the dead to communicate with the living. For some reason, this made her think of Todd; if anyone could invent such a thing, he could. From there, her mind traveled to the conversation she’d had with Erik that morning—if it could even be called a conversation, given how ridiculous and one-sided it had been. She remembered Erik telling her: “This line is only for the deadddddd. Do you have a message you want to tell the dead?”

  He’d been joking, of c
ourse, but could it be possible? Could the dead communicate with the living after they’d passed on? If so, how? And what would they say?

  She spent a good half hour wondering why she’d taken such a ridiculous class in the first place. Other than the fact that Father Heall had recommended it, she couldn’t find another reason. Even Professor Blakeslee’s argument, that “a solid understanding of parapsychology can be valuable in dealing with the living,” seemed a bit of a stretch.

  She should’ve dropped the class when she’d had the chance. But now that the deadline had passed, she was stuck with it.

  After crossing out what she’d written and restarting her essay response four times, she finally gave up and penned: Just give them a cell phone. Make sure they have unlimited roll-over minutes. (Eternity is a long time, after all.) And don’t worry about roaming charges. (The dead can’t roam, unless you’re talking about zombies, and nobody wants to talk to them.) She added a smiley at the end, closed her test booklet, and handed it in to the teaching assistant, then slunk out of the room. She was one of the last of her classmates to leave.

  She hated blowing off an answer like that, but there was nothing else she could do. At least the test grader would get a good laugh out of it.

  Hurrying to her car, she pulled her phone from her pocket and thumbed in the number for home.

  “Cell phone for the dead, right.” She shook her head. What was she thinking?

  But Erik’s strange little diversion from his usual shtick kept coming back to her, the eerie way his voice had sounded over the phone, flat and hollow and dead, and his refusal to admit he was joking. What if…?

  “Don’t fall for it, El,” she scolded herself. “He was just messing with you.”

  The phone clicked twice in her ear, rang once, then went silent.

  She pulled it away and saw that she had no signal.

  The walkway she was on wound its way between two tall buildings, and only a slot of the open sky showed above her. She realized it was possible she might be in a dead spot, so she cut across the corner of the building on her right and made her way over to an open area known as Sproul Garden. It was really a grassy area more than a garden, although someone had planted some flowers in pots along the edges, which gave the place some color. The Garden had been landscaped into a shallow bowl that dipped toward one end, where an old concrete fountain sat, as if the weight of the thing had caused the ground to sag there. But the ground wasn’t soft, it was rock hard. And the fountain had been shut off last fall because of the drought.

  A trio of shirtless boys was tossing around a football, killing whatever grass still managed to survive. They were tackling one another, though there didn’t seem to be any purpose to it other than to blow off steam.

  She smiled at them as she passed, amused at how much more physical they became when they noticed her. Golden stalks of dry grass stuck to their sweaty skin, peeled off and drifted away in the breeze.

  She checked her screen again, but was annoyed to find that her phone still had no bars.

  The sky above her was metallic gray and oppressively low, but the air was quite warm and sticky. It felt like rain. She wished it would rain, although she knew not to get her hopes up. The whole past week had been just like it was now: dreary and humid, feeling like the sky was pressing down on her, threatening to crush her. But there hadn’t been a drop of rain all spring, at least since early March. It looked like they were in for a third year of below-average precipitation.

  The grass crunched beneath her feet and the warm wind brushed her hair across her face. She flicked it impatiently away, held her phone up in the air, got a bar. The signal was weak, but it would do. Once she boarded the train, there was no guarantee she’d get another chance to call, and she wanted to be sure her parents got the message she was coming home.

  The call went through. After a brief moment of crackly static, a voice spoke into her ear: We’re sorry, but the number you have dialed is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please hang up and—”

  She frowned at the phone, then disconnected and dialed in the number again. She didn’t think she’d made a mistake, but it was possible.

  But now even the one bar of signal she’d had evaporated away. There was no connection, no recording. Nothing.

  “Head’s up!” someone shouted. “Look out!”

  Something flashed just inches in front of her face, something dark brown and moving too fast for her to even react to. A moment later, the football thumped to the ground near her and bounced backward, coming to rest near her feet.

  “Sorry,” one of the boys said, running up to her and breathing heavily. He came to a stop a few arm-lengths away and smiled apologetically. “You okay?”

  “It missed.”

  “Oh. Good. You’re not… Are you sure it didn’t hit you?”

  She realized she was still frowning. “Um, no. Sorry, it’s not you. It’s my phone. It’s…” She gestured helplessly, wanting to throw the stupid thing away.

  The boy stepped closer. Ellen could smell the sweat on his skin, the salt and the scent of grass and wet earth and the faint aroma of last night’s stale beer on his breath. He was bare-chested and sweat was running down his skin in rivulets, through the tangled matt of curly blond chest hairs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, watched his chest rise and fall as he caught his breath.

  He reached over and gently lifted her hand and the phone in it. Ellen felt her skin prickle when he did, and she was tempted to pull away, but she didn’t.

  “Oh, see? You got TCI. They’ve got the crappiest service around,” he grunted with self-satisfaction while checking out her screen. “Their network is, like, two generations behind everyone else’s. Hold up, let me get my phone. I’ll be right back.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, really, it’s cool.” And he was off, sprinting across the grass, leaving her standing there watching helplessly, needing to leave, not wanting to. The other boys were looking on, laughing at their companion and complaining that he’d forgotten the football.

  “Smooth move, brah,” she heard one of them say and the boy bent over a backpack thrown onto the grass. “Did ya get her number?”

  Ellen realized it was there on the screen of her phone. Smooth move was right.

  She bent down to hide the redness on her face and picked up the football. She considered throwing it back to the boys, but then realized it would be foolish for her to even try. Erik could throw a ball pretty well. Even Todd could. But she was useless with the thing. She couldn’t even kick a soccer ball straight. So she waited for the blond boy to return.

  He hurriedly donned a tee shirt as he came back. Ellen tried not to let his appearance distract her. She tried not to notice how the shirt stuck to him like a coat of paint. You’re engaged, girl, a voice inside her head reminded her, while another voice argued that looking did no harm. At least not for another three months.

  The boy handed her his phone; she gave him the ball in exchange.

  He had four bars while she still had none.

  Ellen dialed in her parents’ number into his phone, realizing only afterward that she had just given him that one, too. Oh well. While she waited, she gave the boy a thankful smile. He smiled back. She turned slightly away.

  “Right,” she heard him say. “Privacy. Gotcha.”

  She heard him grunt as he threw the football back to his friends. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it sail way over their heads.

  “Don’t know my own strength,” he said.

  Ellen smiled. It was cute how hard he was trying.

  She could hear the muffled ring as the call connected.

  By her watch, she saw that she had less than forty minutes before her train would be leaving. She still had to get to the station, park, get her ticket, get something to eat.

  “Come on,” she muttered under her breath, but the phone continued to ring. Nobody answered.

  “St
range.” She disconnected the call.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Thanks. I’m really sorry, but I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  “Was it something I said?”

  “No, I just have a train to catch.” She realized how lame that sounded, but didn’t elaborate. She handed the boy’s phone back, reached down and reshouldered her backpack, which she’d set between her feet, and headed for the parking lot.

  “Hey, what’s your name?”

  She threw him a smile over her shoulder. “Ellen.”

  The boy grinned and waved. “Mine’s Levi. Nice to meet you.”

  Ellen nodded.

  “Maybe I’ll see you around then?”

  “Maybe.” She turned one last time, still smiling, hoping she wasn’t encouraging him too much. “Thanks again…Levi.”

  “No, thank you.”

  When she reached her car, the frown had returned to her face. She’d waited—what?—ten, twelve rings? And nobody had answered. That wasn’t so strange. Her parents were probably out getting lunch somewhere. What had been strange was that the answering machine hadn’t picked up. Why had they turned it off?

  It was really beginning to bug her that she couldn’t seem to get through to them.

  And now that first attempt in the Garden was really beginning to bother her. She was sure she’d dialed the number correctly; in fact, when she checked her outgoing calls, she saw that she had. So why had it told her the number was out of service?

  All she wanted to do was leave a message and she couldn’t even seem to do that.

  As she made her way out of the campus parking lot, she glanced down and saw that her phone had finally picked up a strong signal. She made a sound of disgust.

  “Figures.”

  She’d just have to try again at the station.

  † † †