The Sleep Experiment Read online

  "Will remind readers what chattering teeth sound like" ‒ Kirkus Reviews

  "Voracious readers of horror will delightfully consume the contents of Bates's World's Scariest Places books" ‒ Publishers Weekly

  "Creatively creepy and sure to scare" ‒ The Japan Times

  "Thriller fans and readers of Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, and other masters of the art will find much to love" ‒ Midwest Book Review

  "An ice-cold thriller full of mystery, suspense, fear" ‒ David Moody, author of HATER and AUTUMN

  "I have long been a fan of Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Frank Peretti and I feel confident that I can now add Jeremy Bates to that list" ‒ Jennifer Wilson, Reader Views

  "Reads like a combination of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker" ‒ Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

  "A page-turner in the true sense of the word" ‒ HorrorAddicts

  "Will make your skin crawl" ‒ Scream Magazine

  "Shocking" ‒ Booklist

  "Told with an authoritative voice full of heart and insight" ‒ Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker nominated author

  "Grabs and doesn't let go until the end" ‒ Writer's Digest

  "A horror writer to watch" ‒ True Review

  "Bates offers a truly chilling tale that reminds readers that humans can be the worst type of monster to fear, after all" ‒ Publishers Weekly

  "Would make a great screenplay!" ‒ Suspense Magazine

  "Bates doesn't miss a trick" ‒ Glenn Kleier, New York Times bestselling author

  "Bates knows how to creep into his reader's mind and toy around" ‒ Horror Palace

  "Something to give you chills before you go to bed" ‒ San Francisco Book Review

  "Excellent!" ‒ Andrew Peterson, international bestselling author of FIRST TO KILL

  "Spellbinding" ‒ Bestsellersworld

  "Will delight horror fans who want their novels steeped in psychological suspense as well as action" ‒ Midwest Book Review

  "Invites you to read it in one sitting" ‒ Hellnotes

  The Sleep Experiment

  USA Today bestselling author Jeremy Bates has written more than twenty novels and novellas, which have been translated into several languages and downloaded more than one million times. Midwest Book Review compares his work to “Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, and other masters of the art.” He has won both an Australian Shadows Award and a Canadian Arthur Ellis Award. He was also a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards, the only major book awards decided by readers. His debut novel reached #1 in the Amazon Kindle Store, while the novels in the World’s Scariest Places series are set in real locations, and so far include Suicide Forest in Japan, The Catacombs in Paris, Helltown in Ohio, Island of the Dolls in Mexico, and Mountain of the Dead in Russia. You can check out any of these places on the web.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE WORLD’S SCARIEST PLACES SERIES

  Suicide Forest

  The Catacombs

  Helltown

  Island of the Dolls

  Mountain of the Dead

  THE WORLD’S SCARIEST LEGENDS SERIES

  Mosquito Man

  The Sleep Experiment

  THE NEW AMERICA SERIES

  New America: Utopia Calling

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  White Lies

  The Taste of Fear

  SHORT NOVELS

  Black Canyon

  Run

  Rewind

  Neighbors

  Six Bullets

  Box of Bones

  The Mailman

  Re-Roll

  COLLECTIONS

  Dark Hearts

  Bad People

  BOX SETS

  World’s Scariest Places: Volume One

  World’s Scariest Places: Volume Two

  THE SLEEP EXPERIMENT

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeremy Bates

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2019

  ISBN 978-1-988091-38-9

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The novels in the World’s Scariest Legends series are based on real legends.

  And for a limited time, visit the author’s website at www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of the critically acclaimed novella Black Canyon, winner of Crime Writers of Canada The Lou Allin Memorial Award.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Last Day of Instruction

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Days 3-5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Days 8-9

  Day 10

  Day 11

  Day 12

  Day 13

  Day 14

  Epilogue

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  SUICIDE FOREST

  THE CATACOMBS

  HELLTOWN

  ISLAND OF THE DOLLS

  MOUNTAIN OF THE DEAD

  THE SLEEP EXPERIMENT

  JEREMY BATES

  “There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head… All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”

  – Stephen King

  Prologue

  Flanked by his defense team, Dr. Roy Wallis exited the San Francisco Hall of Justice minutes after a jury had acquitted him of all the charges filed against him in his nearly month-long trial. Hundreds of boisterous demonstrators, cordoned off behind police tape, filled Bryant Street outside the austere building. Many held homemade signs proclaiming dire end-of-times warnings such as: “The RAPTURE is upon us!” and “Judgment Day is coming!” and “REPENT now for the END is near!”

  Dr. Wallis stopped before a phalanx of television cameras for an impromptu and celebratory press conference. When the throng of journalists and reporters quieted down, he said into the two-dozen or so microphones thrust at him, “Walt Whitman once wrote that ‘the fear of hell is little or nothing to me.’ But he was Walt Whitman, so he can write whatever he damn well pleased.” Wallis stroked his beard, reveling in the knowledge the world would be hanging onto his each and every word. “I’m guessing,” he continued, “Walt most likely never believed that hell existed in the first place, hence his cavalier attitude.” He shook a finger, as if to scorn the father of free verse. “But I, my lovely friends, I now know hell exists, and let me tell you—it scares the utter shit out of me.”

  Resounding silence except for the cluck-cluck-cluck of photographs being snapped.

  Then everyone began shouting questions at once.

  Last Day of Instruction

  Six months earlier

  “Why do we sleep?” Dr. Roy Wallis said, his eyes roaming the darkened auditorium inside UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, Education, and Psychology. Five hundred or so students filled the tiered gallery that fanned around him, though the stage spotlights washed most of them in black. “It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Sleep is sleep. It’s an essential part of our survival. Sleep, food, water. The Big Three you can’t do without. Nevertheless, while the benefits of food and water are quite evident to us, the actual benefits of sleep have always been masked in a shroud of mystery.”

  He depressed the forward butt
on of the presentation clicker in his right hand and turned slightly to confirm the image on the projection screen behind him. It depicted a sleeping person with a number of question marks above her head.

  “The truth,” Dr. Wallis continued, “is that nobody really knows why we sleep, even though the subject has fascinated humans for more than two millennia. The Rishis of India agonized over our states of waking consciousness and dreaming. The ancient Egyptians built temples to the goddess Isis, where devotees met with priests to engage in early forms of hypnosis and dream interpretation. The Greeks and Romans had sleep deities such as Hypnos, Somnus, and Morpheus. The Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, compared sleep to death. William Shakespeare characterized sleep as ‘nature’s soft nurse’ due to its restorative nature. However, in terms of scientific understanding, the exact mechanisms of sleep remained largely mysterious until the mid-twentieth century. Researchers have since shown that neural networks grown in lab dishes exhibit stages of activity and inactivity that resemble waking and sleeping, which could mean sleep arises naturally when single neurons work together with other neurons. Indeed, this explains why even the simplest organisms show sleep-like behaviors.”

  Dr. Wallis clicked to the next image. A photograph of an alien-looking worm on a black background appeared behind him. “Cute, isn’t he? That’s Caenorhabditis elegans—a tiny worm with only three hundred and two neurons. Yet even it cycles through quiet, lethargic periods that you could argue might be sleep. Admittedly, it’s not sleep as we think of the term, but that’s because we have larger and more complex brains, which require deeper neural networks. More neurons joining with other neurons equals a greater period of inactivity—such as the seven or eight hours of shuteye we experience each night.”

  Wallis paced across the stage, stroked his beard.

  “Nevertheless, even if this theory is true—neurons drive our stages of wakefulness and sleep—it still doesn’t explain why we sleep, or what exactly is going on during sleep. And a lot is going on, my friends. Our bodies don’t simply shut down when Mr. Sandman comes a-knocking. On the one hand, it seems our brains use this period of inactivity to take out the trash, so to speak. The brain is a huge consumer of energy, which means all those waste chemicals that are produced as part of a cell’s natural activity have to get flushed out sometime. Moreover, it seems the brain also uses this downtime to reorganize and prioritize the information it has gathered during the daytime, as well as consolidates our short-term memories into long-term ones. This explains why when you lose sleep, you tend to have problems with your attention span, working out problems, recalling certain memories, even regulating your emotions. Everything’s a little out of whack.”

  Dr. Wallis scanned the dark veil before him. The few spectral students he could make out in the first couple of rows were watching him intently.

  “Having said all of this, the human brain is an incredibly complex and powerful organ. It has more than enough computing power to get its housekeeping done while we’re awake. So why shut down the entire body each night and leave us as defenseless as newborns? Is there something else going on during sleep that we don’t know about? Maybe.” He shrugged. “Or maybe not.”

  Click. A moody Neolithic scene appeared on the projection screen in which a band of fur-clad prehistoric humans hunkered inside the mouth of a cave as the setting sun bloodied the evening sky. Each burly figure gripped a stone weapon. Each set of large eyes appeared weary and watchful of the lurking dangers that night called forth.

  “For our poor stone-age ancestors, it made sense for them to search for resources during the daytime when they could see best, and to hide during the nighttime when predator activity was at its peak. Yet…what do you do while hiding? If any of you have played Hide-and-Seek with an obtuse friend or sibling, you know that hiding becomes boring fast, because you’re not doing much of anything. Imagine hiding in the same spot from dusk until dawn. Every night. Three-hundred-sixty-five days a year. It’d be worse than listening to a tape of Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried arguing on eternal loop. So to pass the time—and as an added bonus, to conserve energy—their bodies shut down until it was time to get up and go look for food again. Such a solution applies not only to humans but pretty much every lifeform on the planet. Hell, even machines similarly ‘sleep,’ not to stave off boredom, of course, but to conserve energy.”

  Dr. Wallis paced, stroked his beard, paced some more.

  “So back to my initial question of why we sleep…? Well, if you want my opinion, I believe the answer to be pathetically pedestrian. We sleep, my young friends, to pass the time and to conserve energy. All that other jazz I mentioned that goes on when the lights are out—your brain flushing waste chemicals, categorizing learning and memories—that’s all ancillary, accomplished during sleep because sleep offers a convenient, not necessary, time to do so.”

  Click. Gone were the prehistoric humans on the projection screen, replaced by a gleaming city of glass and steel. He gestured toward the image.

  “London, England. A far cry from the untamed plains and forests of ancient Eurasia, isn’t it? No cave lions or bears are going to get you there. Food’s not a problem either. Enter any supermarket to access aisle upon aisle of every type of food imaginable, all of which is restocked daily. Thus safety from predators and conserving our energy are no longer problems for contemporary humans. The majority of the population has evolved beyond such basic needs. So allow me to now ask you a new question, my inquisitive friends.” He paused dramatically, acquiescing to the showman inside him. “In this enlightened day and age, do humans even need sleep?”

  ◆◆◆

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” Dr. Wallis said. “My answer is simple. No, I don’t think humans need sleep. In fact, I think the entire human race is sleeping solely due to habit.”

  Chatter and uncertain laughter filled the auditorium.

  Wallis waited it out for a few seconds before holding up his hands, palms forward, to command attention once more.

  The mutiny died down.

  Wallis depressed the forward button on the presentation clicker. The new image showed a businessman in a suit and tie seated behind a desk in a cluttered cubicle. His eyes were bloodshot, his face lined with exhaustion. A steaming cup of coffee stood next to his keyboard. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. If we don’t need sleep, why do we look like this guy after an all-nighter? I’ll tell you why. Because while you were out partying, your body was building up what biologists refer to as sleep pressure. That’s right, that’s what they call it—sleep pressure. What exactly is this sleep pressure, you ask? Well, those same biologists don’t know. They’ve simply named something they don’t yet understand. Think dark matter. We know it exists, we just don’t know why. So…sleep pressure,” he repeated, as if tasting the word. “Sleep pressure. Indeed, it’s like a Tolkien riddle-game, isn’t it? What accumulates during wakefulness and disperses during sleep? What is this metaphorical tally of hours, locked in some chamber of the brain, waiting to be wiped clean every night? And imagine…what if we could access it? What if we could reprogram it?” He smiled. “What if, my beautiful friends, we could delete it? Yes, delete sleep pressure. Remove forever tiredness and sleep—that colossal waste of time when we fall unconscious every night, that evolutionary anachronism that has no practical benefits for contemporary humans. Imagine if you had an extra seven or eight hours every day just how many more selfies you could post to Instagram?”

  Some chuckles, though not many. The air in the auditorium sizzled with expectation.

  Dr. Wallis went to the podium in the center of the stage. He played his fingers down the lapels of his tailored suit jacket. When he was sure every set of eyes in the audience were upon him, he said, “Let us consider what happened in January of 1964, my friends. A high school student in San Diego named Randy Gardner went eleven days—that is, two hundred and sixty-four hours—without sleep. Most interesting of all, near the end of the eleven days, he was not sh
uffling around like a zombie. To the contrary, he, among many other fascinating feats, was able to beat the researcher conducting the experiment in pinball. He also presided over a press conference in which he spoke clearly and articulately. Overall, he proved to be in excellent health.”

  “How long did he crash for?” a male voice in the darkness called out.

  “Thank you for the segue,” Wallis said. “How long did he sleep for after the eleven days? Not for as long as you would expect. A mere fourteen hours—twice the number of hours the average person sleeps today. When he woke, he was not groggy at all. He was completely refreshed. That boy is now an old man. He is still alive today, to the best of my knowledge, and time has revealed no long-term physical or psychological side-effects at all.”