NO SLEEP HORROR ✰ "JAMES" (PART 2) BY T.M. KNIGHT

Ethan woke up in a dark forest. He blinked against the pressure in his left temple, a pressure so bad he felt his head would burst. 

What the hell had happened? The last thing he remembered was hearing someone, or something, approach him and Tucker in the woods of the park, then an abyss in his memory. 

He tried to remember, to go into that abyss, but the second he did, all the breath in his lungs was stolen. Ethan doubled over with his mouth wide open and his eyes unseeing, but no matter how much his airway contracted in on itself and the dreadful noises which escaped from the depths of his diaphragm, he couldn’t breathe.

Until he let go of his mind, the asphyxiation didn’t let go of him. Something was wrong in his head, but he wasn’t about to try that again. Without access to his memory, he couldn’t begin to figure out what happened to Tucker either. 

“Tucker?” He hissed through his tight chest, hardly a whisper, terrified of the dark between the tree trunks that were barely visible by the light of the overcast night. He stared into the void for a bit longer and turned his head to and from. A fact started to become apparent. Ethan was no longer in the forest of the park. The trees were too plentiful and the canopy too thick. In that fact, he had no idea where he was at all.

“Tucker!” He braved another call for his best friend, this time louder. He staggered to a stand and felt around for his phone. Thank God— it was still in his pocket. He took it out and the light seared onto his face amid the dark of his surroundings. Before he started dialing Tucker’s number, his phone started buzzing with an incoming call: NO CALLER ID.

The screen flickered with static and then his thumb was moving to press answer before he was even aware of what he was doing. Then suddenly, a tackling impact from behind him so hard he heard it internally and which knocked him to the ground immediately. He groaned and gasped to get away from whatever it was that hit him when a hand covered his mouth to muffle his noise. Ethan was about to lose it in a frenzy when he realized it was Tucker. 

Tucker took his hand away and moved to the side to flatten himself on the forest floor next to Ethan. “Don’t answer the phone man, don’t even touch it!” Tucker whispered almost inaudibly by his ear. Ethan didn’t need to be told twice. He threw his phone away from him and then immediately listened to Tucker when he desperately motioned for him to be quiet. 

They stilled on the forest floor, nearly dead still. A few seconds later, music. Distantly, faintly. The same melancholy dirty beat, only much deeper pitched and cursed. The music faded out not so long after it faded in. After a while, Tucker let out the breath that he’d apparently been holding in his chest. Once he did, Ethan realized he had been holding his own breath too, and let out the air his lungs were screaming at him to breathe out. 

Ethan started as he quickly sat up from the ground. He reached to grab his phone again so they could have more light. “Tucker what the hell—“

“Are you crazy man keep your voice down!” Tucker pushed himself up from the floor. “He could still be around!”

“Who?!” Ethan whisper shouted; his heart was racing a mile a minute. 

“James! It’s him I saw him—“

“What? You actually saw a ghost?” But Tucker wasn’t listening to him. 

Tucker sat back on his heels as he kneeled and tucked his hands underneath his armpits. “My mind… something’s wrong with my mind man; it’s like it’s infected or something!”

Ethan was too shaken up to even argue with him about the ghost at that moment. “I know what you mean… there’s something weird with my head too. I can’t… move around in there.”

Tucker put his hands on his knees and hung his head. “Exactly… It feels like I’m trapped. I can’t think about anything. I can only sit in a square box and be nothing else.” 

Ethan felt his own self subjugated in his senses as he tried to find the words for what to say next. “It feels like someone watching me… but inside.” He wasn’t even safe in his own skin, let alone in these dark woods. “Watching what I think, the sound of my breath in my own lungs, controlling it somehow—“

When Ethan aimed the screen light at Tucker, Tucker screwed his face as if he were in pain and grabbed his ear.

“What’s wrong man?” Ethan stirred through dead leaves as he went closer to him.

“Somehow even worse than my head is my ear. I— I answered the phone earlier. When I woke up. I thought it was you man, I thought it was you.” Ethan had known Tucker for a long time, but this was the first time he saw him close to tears. “There was this, this awful noise, I can hardly even describe it, that came from the speaker. It was like a thousand needles scraping against the most brittle piece of rock, magnified and layered in echos just like sound reverbs in mountain ranges.”

Ethan’s head hurt just thinking about that. Then he got a look at Tucker’s ear. 

“Shit, your ear’s bleeding man.” And it was bleeding quite badly too. Tucker’s whole left side along his neck was covered in blood. 

“Oh God.” Tucker touched the blood and stared at his red fingers. “I didn’t even notice from how freaked out I was. I ran like crazy just hoping to find you—“ Tucker paused abruptly. He turned to look at Ethan, his face white as bone. “Did you say something just now man?”

“No, I didn’t say anything.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but Ethan swore he saw more blood running down Tucker’s ear. It looked like a black pulse in the moonlight. 

Ethan got up and offered a hand to Tucker. “Okay you know what, let’s not sit out here trying to figure anything out. Let’s just find a way home.”

“But how? We’re totally lost dude. I ran for ages and I didn’t see any way out of the forest.”

“How the hell— Ah my HEAD! ” Ethan shouted. He didn’t care who or what heard him. He was just so angry. “Screw this, I’m gonna climb a tree and see our way out of here.”

Without any more thought— he was physically incapable of it— Ethan took to the nearest pine tree to start climbing. He climbed with fury, uncaring of the sharp bark that scratched up his palms or the sheer pain in his muscles as he repeatedly pulled himself up. Then he got to the top of the tree. This tree was so tall that it reached above the upper canopy.

As far as his eye could see there was nothing but dense dark forest of pines like a stormy sea under the moonlight. It was like it went on forever, darkness upon darkness, with no end in sight. 

No… it did go on forever. There was no end in sight. 

He was about to call down to Tucker when the moon moved over his head and shone down to the ground where he’d been. There, in stark silhouette, was Tucker, laying face up, his eyes open and unseeing, fixed in horror, dead on the forest floor. Blood had come out of his eyes as well as his ears, the side of his mouth as well. 

The sight was so shocking, that Ethan slipped where he hung. And then he was falling and falling to meet the ground— to meet his end. 

TO BE CONTINUED