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  AWAKE

  By

  Scott C. Smith

  AWAKE

  Copyright © 2012 by Scott C. Smith

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this

  ebook, or portions thereof, in any form without written permission from the author. The author can be contacted by email at:

  [email protected]

  This ebook is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Special thanks to Melissa for reading the first draft and providing feedback, to Erin for her inspiration, and to all of my friends and followers in the social media realm for their support of this project.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I used to take sleeping for granted; I think lots of people do. When I was in my teens I could just turn out the lights, climb into bed, and be sound asleep minutes later. I'd sleep through the night, and the only time I'd wake up was when my alarm clock went off. I'd awaken refreshed and ready for the evils of high school.

  Now? Not so much. I'm lucky in one week to get eight hours total.

  I'm not sure what happened or why, but as the years progressed I started finding that sleep was becoming more elusive for me. Instead of drifting off to sleep in minutes like I did as a kid, I'd lay there in bed, unable to turn off my brain. Finally, after 30 minutes (or 60) I'd drift off to a listless slumber. I also started awakening during the night. At first it was maybe one or two times; it progressed to waking up every hour or so.

  Of course, when you can't sleep you hear a lot of ideas from people about what you can do to get sleep, and of course I'd try them all: calming teas, meditation, doing nothing in bed aside from sleeping, various herbal supplements, and so on.

  I'd been to a sleep specialist, of course; this doctor of slumber ran breathing tests, to see if I had sleep apnea (no); she'd try various sleep drugs on me, all of which did nothing. Eventually a diagnosis came: medication resistant insomnia.

  As each year passed things got worse, the point where I started not getting any sleep, or if I did, it was only for brief periods of time.

  As I write this, it's been three weeks since I last slept. I still try. I guess I'm hoping against hope that sleep will return.

  Something is happening.

  It's something inexplicable. Maybe it's a hallucination. It feels real.

  For one, I've spent some time with my ex-wife; I've even kissed her. That may not sound particularly amazing, but it is:

  She's been dead for three years.

  We were never even properly divorced, and our separation was in large part because of my insomnia. Of course, Melissa would not have said that the insomnia was a factor, but I know it was; I know how much it scared her.

  “How did you sleep?” she always asked after waking up. Melissa was a sleeper. She fell asleep moments after climbing into bed; in fact, she slept a lot, sometimes ten hours a day or longer. I envied her.

  “Not much,” I'd say, sipping a cup of coffee. She'd sigh, give me a kiss, and get dressed for work.

  I wasn't working during this time. I was finding it increasingly difficult to focus on driving; after a few days of not sleeping my hands would shake. My job required steady hands. I had to take an indefinite leave of absence. I became a house husband, as it's called, and I think I did a pretty good job.

  Often Melissa would come home from work to tell me about something she had read about online related to sleep and insomnia. One night she came home and handed me something she had printed at work; a Wikipedia article.

  I scanned the document. “Fatal familial insomnia? What's this?”

  “You can die from not sleeping!” she cried. “I think you should take this to your doctor.”

  “Hon, this says only 100 people have ever died from this condition. From only 40 families.”

  “Can you just tell her about it? Maybe they can test you for it?”

  I didn't want her to feel bad. “Sure, I'll mention this to her.” And I did. My doctor was familiar with the condition but assured me I didn't have it. “You don't have the presenting symptoms, and you're too young.”

  There was a tension building in our marriage. For one we rarely saw each other; the toll of being the primary bread winner was also hard on her.

  Like I said, we eventually separated, after eight years of marriage. I moved out, cashed in some stocks, and found a depressing studio apartment.

  Melissa died ten months after the separation; she had been driving home on a night where the roads were dangerously slick with ice. The police said she lost control and plowed into an oncoming semi-truck.

  The separation had been incredibly difficult for me; Melissa's death was a crushing blow. When she died I hadn't spoken to her in several months. We exchanged the occasional email, but that was the only contact I had with her. Her emails were generally a paragraph long, at the most.

  What I found out when she died is that she still had me listed as the beneficiary on her life insurance policy. This puzzled me because I knew she had intended to change it to make her sister the primary beneficiary. It was a sizable policy. Not only that, she hadn't changed her will. From beyond the grave she was taking care of me. With the life insurance, plus her stocks and other investments (both of us had lucked out by investing in several tech companies at low rates; we both had purchased several hundred shares of stock in a certain search engine company and were, on paper at least, millionaires).

  I was financially independent; I could now afford a place to live that wasn't so depressing as the studio apartment. The thought of moving back into the house we had lived in together was too much to bear, so I put it on the market.

  I hadn't anticipated being single as I approached my 40th birthday. I certainly wasn't enjoying it.

  I also hadn't anticipated that when I did reach my 40th birthday, my perception of what was real and what was not would be so shaken.

  Chapter Two

  The change to my perception was a gradual one. It's hard to explain exactly what was happening.

  My routine was pretty basic. I spent most of the day wandering around my home. It had a nice garden which I tended for hours, despite the shakes. I had told my doctor about these symptoms; in addition to the shakes I sweated profusely, even when it wasn't hot. My doctor wasn't entirely sure what would cause these tremors or the sweating. She had me try some medications but, like most meds I took, it didn't really seem to help at all.

  So, I did my best in the garden despite the tremors. I'd pull weeds and water the plants, and spend a lot of time thinking.

  It was a Monday afternoon when I heard to voice.

  It was a gorgeous day – the sun was shining (which is a treat for the state I live in, known more for the “liquid” form of sunshine), there was a light breeze, and the sky was (mostly) blue.

  I glanced around the garden. Most of the plants looked good; there were a few that needed some weeding and watering.

  I was hooked into my iPod that day – normally when I garden I prefer the quiet, but on that day I was in the mood for some music.

  I had been working on the garden for about 40 minutes when I heard my name being called. The voice was louder than the music I was playing.

  “What the hell?” I muttered. I turned off the iPod and stood up. I glanced around to see if someone was there.

  Nothing.

  Convinced I had imagined it, I was about to put the iPod back on play when I heard, quite loudly:

  “Charles! Charles! Is that you?”

  I had heard it was common to experience auditory hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. And maybe it was a hallucination. It sounded like a real v
oice.

  It happened again.

  This time it seemed to be coming from a different location, and was fainter.

  The voice. Silence for five seconds. The voice.

  I could in fact follow the sound of this voice, which I did. I dropped my hoe and headed in the direction I thought the voice was coming from.

  My neighborhood is a pretty standard suburban neighborhood, meaning there are lots of houses that look alike. It was a quite community; there's a wooded area that connects to my garden with a trail.

  The voice was coming from that direction.

  Maybe, I thought, this is just some kind of prank.

  I didn't believe that. I suppose someone could be punking me, but why?

  The wooded area has a nice trail to walk on, although it's not a very long walk. It was cool and quiet in the forest shade – quiet aside from the voice which kept calling out my name.

  After a few minutes on the trail, the voice became louder, so loud in fact that it hurt my ears.

  There was another sound.

  It sounded a bit like static – like from the days before cable television when you couldn't get a station to come in, no matter how you adjusted the rabbit ears.

  Suddenly, a few yards in the distance, I could see...something.

  It was like a shimmering – the kind you might see coming off of a road when it's really hot outside.

  But it wasn't that, either.

  It's hard to say what it was like, exactly, as I had never seen anything like it before. In the shade of the forest there was a spot where the light seemed to be concentrated brightly into one small area.

  In fact, what it looked like, was a square section of reality completely different and inexplicable from everything else.

  Here I was, in the woods, and looking at something that seemed to have teared through the fabric of reality. And I could see through it – to what looked like a street.

  As I approached this bizarre tear in reality, the voice calling my name stopped. There was silence for a few seconds, and then it resumed – albeit muffled and difficult to hear.

  Whatever it was I was looking at, it was close to the ground. I crouched down to get a closer look.

  There definitely was a street. In fact, after looking at it for a few minutes, I could even see the tires of a car drive by.

  It wasn't going at a car's speed, though. In fact what it looked like was still images of a car flipped through to create a crude form of animation. And all I could see was the bottom half of the tire.

  Not thinking, I touched this odd patch of – reality?

  I didn't really expect anything to happen. In fact, part of me was convinced that as soon as I touched it, it would simply disappear, proving to my mind that this was a hallucination.

  That didn't happen.

  I was able to actually push my hand through this tear in reality, and when I did I felt a sensation course through my hand; at first it was a tingling, as if the hand were asleep. After a few seconds the tingling stopped and what I could feel was warmth – the warmth of the sun, as a matter of fact.

  And as I pushed my hand through, the portal – or whatever it was – widened.

  I quickly pulled my hand back.

  The portal returned to its original shape.

  You are not seeing this, I thought to myself. This is impossible. A very reasonable thought.

  Suddenly, from a different direction, I heard the blaring of a train horn.

  I stood up, and off to my right I could see another shimmering portal – this one was much larger, and what I was seeing didn't look like crude animation.

  I headed over to this second portal. It looked like a large window, and what I was looking at was a train station. My view seemed to be from a spot across from the platform where people waited for their train to arrive. There were about a dozen people at this platform, dressed in standard work garb. Was it morning through this portal? Afternoon? I couldn't tell.

  Could they see me?

  There was a man who seemed to be looking right at me. He was dressed in a dark blue suit; he held a newspaper in his hands. He looked pretty much like any generic corporate drone you'd find in any office building. He was in his 50s, possibly; the hair on his head (what remained of it) was going gray, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses.

  It really seemed like he was staring at me, so I waved.

  No reaction.

  I did it again, this time while yelling “hey!” but again, no reaction.

  After a few seconds he put the newspaper up to his face.

  Apparently, this portal was one-way.

  What was on the other side?

  I intended to find out.

  Chapter Three

  Of course, part of me was convinced that I was dreaming. Maybe I had fallen asleep at home. I'd been exhausted enough, although I hadn't really slept well (or at all) for weeks. The whole situation was too incredible to be real. A portal to what? Another world? I know in physics there's a concept of parallel worlds; it's one thing to read about such things and quite another to experience it first hand.

  Deep down I knew it wasn't a dream. When faced with the inexplicable it makes sense to come up with an explanation for something impossible.

  Yet, there it was, another world connected to this one. I could see it.

  Was I really going to step through this portal?

  I had no idea what would happen, if anything.

  What I would need to do is test this portal. I glanced around and found some branches a few feet away. I grabbed them and returned to this strange gateway to another world.

  I tossed a branch through.

  I watched to see what, if anything would happen.

  What I saw was the branch land on the ground in that world. Upon impact it puffed up a little plume of dust.

  I tossed the other branches in, with the same result.

  The portal, it seemed, did transport things to that world.

  But would it work with flesh and blood? For a moment I was reminded of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly as he tested out his teleportation device with disastrous results.

  Then again, this was real life and not a movie.

  Taking a deep breath, I gathered up my courage and stepped through the portal.

  * * *

  The trip was instantaneous. As I passed through there was a strange sensation throughout my body; it felt like every inch of my skin was asleep for a second, and then it passed.

  I emerged into another world.

  I quickly looked behind me.

  The portal was gone.

  Shit.

  How would I get back?

  I had no idea and of course I didn't know how things worked in this world.

  Nothing I could do about that now.

  The new world lay before me.

  It looked exactly like my world.

  I was at a train station. I was about 10 yards away from the tracks and the platform beyond.

  Apparently in the time it took for me to go through the portal, a train had come and gone; no one was at the platform. Which was fine with me. I don't know how people would have reacted to my inexplicable appearance. Did I emerge out of nothing?

  The light was different. It had been early afternoon when I stepped through. I didn't know what time it was here.

  I glanced at my watch.

  It had stopped.

  That didn't surprise me. I headed for the train platform. There probably was a clock, and maybe someone had left behind a newspaper.

  Getting to the platform was more difficult than I had thought it would be. Maybe in this world they were a lot more safety conscious. Whatever the case there was no easy way to get to it. I had to wander along the tracks (mindful of any approaching trains) until I reached a road, and then I had to backtrack to reach the station.

  Wherever I was, it was strangely deserted. Even though I lived in a quiet suburban community, it only took a few minutes to get to the crowded urban reality; cars, pedestrian
s, ugly traffic at all hours.

  Despite being at a train station, it didn't appear to be a busy one.

  There were signs of life, though. I passed some trash cans that were filled. The (empty) parking lot had some spots where oil had dripped out onto.

  The platform had a sign that said HAWTHORNE STATION.

  It looked like a standard train station. The wait area on the platform was blocked off by gates; ticket kiosks were placed throughout the station.

  I wandered over to one of the kiosks. It was a computer terminal with what looked like a standard credit card swipe slot. I pushed a button on the screen. ZONE 1&2, $1.50 ZONE 3&4 $2.25 ALL ZONE $3.50 DAY PASS $5.00

  Curious, I pulled out my wallet and grabbed my Visa card. I swiped it through.

  After a couple of seconds it said, ACCOUNT INVALID PLEASE TRY A DIFFERENT CARD.

  I had a MasterCard, so I tried that. This time it said: CARD NOT ACCEPTED PLEASE TRY A DIFFERENT CARD.

  I looked at the kiosk for any signs of what credit cards it accepted. I found a sticker that read, “ACCEPTS VISA, RELIANCE, AM-CAM EXPRESS.”

  MasterCard was apparently not known in this world. But what was Reliance? Or Am-Cam Express?

  I had no idea. I wandered around the station, looking for a clock. I found one. It displayed: 8:49 a.m. SOL 22 2011.

  Sol?

  So there were some differences in this world.

  I decided to hunt down a newspaper. Surely one of the commuters had left one behind.

  As I started this task, I could hear a car pulling into the parking lot. I was absorbed in my task so I really didn't pay much attention to it.

  On the platform, there were a couple of trash cans. I headed to the nearest one and peered inside.

  No newspapers. No magazines, either. In fact, there wasn't any paper at all in it.

  Perhaps in this world they were big on recycling. I headed over to the other trash can. No paper in it, either. Although I did see something that caught my eye: a can of Crystal Pepsi. I guess in this world it must have really taken off.

  I could hear footsteps approaching. I turned towards the sound.