Part of a project I'm working on; simple, four page, fast stories of murderers. I plan to keep doing a bunch of these until I write one half decent book of different murders. So, here's my current diamond in the rough. Have a lucky day!
Most people you see will admit that they enjoy a good night’s sleep. And who wouldn’t? Sleep is a natural, human ability to completely separate yourself from the rest of the world, putting yourself in either a peaceful dream made of your own imagination, or in a nice, pitch-black silence. Sure, you’ll get a little scare from a nightmare now and then, but those won’t happen often.
Jessica is a woman who loved sleep to a much further extent. It was all that she did. She lived in an insanely small apartment with nothing more than an expensive, comfortable, large bed. She got home every night after a long and lazy work day, and just slept until her alarm clock woke her up. And that alarm clock was the only thing that ever could. When she was a child, her peers commonly yelled into her ears while she was asleep (earlier than anybody else, I might add), with no success in waking her up. If that alarm clock didn’t go off, she’d sleep twenty four hours straight, waking her up to her usual fearful, antisocial, quiet personality.
And the silent personality helped her plenty; she worked as a janitor at her old high school. Just about the only female janitor anywhere. She was a joke to all the students, but at the same time she didn’t mind and never wanted to speak up. She liked being a center of attention, even if it was in the form of laughter and mockery. It made her feel important, and a little bit different. And to come home to a relaxing bed and a long sleep between her job hours made her life seemingly perfect. Life was good.
But unfortunately, that sort of thing couldn’t last forever. Like most people, Jessica had enemies. Her enemy was a little more general, but it still was…Jessica’s enemy was noise. She may have been out like a light, but her varying dreams still got interrupted when she heard something. It was like the dreams paused until the noise stopped. So Jessica’s neighbor in the apartment next to her was a true holder of her enemy.
The new neighbor was Buck Federline, a woodshop teacher from Texas who worked at the same school as Jessica. He was one of the noisiest neighbors because he liked to bring his work home with him. He had a number of non-electrical tools that, although didn’t make as much noise as a full woodshop, made many annoying hammering and sawing sounds. He kept it as quiet as he could, as not to be kicked out of the building, but it still wasn’t quiet enough.
Jessica didn’t have a single dream in her sleep for the entire first week Buck moved in. As Jessica usually did, she refused to do anything about it. She could just hope for the best, and avoid getting involved. Unfortunately for her, optimism didn’t really do anything too constructive.
After the first week of having her loud neighbor, and getting a terrible nights sleep every day, she decided to take a chance and ask him to be quiet. When she got home from the school late one night, she heard Buck hammering something in his apartment, and so she knocked on his door. Buck didn’t hear the knocking and continued hammering. Jessica gave one loud knock on the door, hurting her hand as she hit it. It got Buck’s attention, at least, as he opened the door.
Buck was a truly scary Texan. He was large and muscular, wore a leather ten-gallon hat, and a lumberjack’s flannel shirt and jeans. This was a guy that you did not want to piss off. Jessica couldn’t even remember what she wanted to say she was so scared of this giant.
“Um…hi…uh…Buck…”
“Do you want something?”
“I…I…I…” Jessica stuttered.
“You what? What do you want?”
“I…n-n-nothing, I guess”
“Do you want to know what I’m working on?”
“No, no, I’m f-f-fine, good night”, she said, walking quickly to her apartment. She went in and got in her bed instantly. She was ashamed by herself, not able to even tell somebody to be quiet. She needed some sort of courage, and she needed it soon. She heard more hammering from Buck’s apartment. It was another terrible, dreamless sleep that night.
Jessica woke up noon the next day. She didn’t have to be at the school until three o’clock, after the school day ended. She walked past a news paper stand, and saw one of them opened to an advertisement page, and noticed one instantly; “Hypnotherapist; learn to face your fears with one little session”. She called the number on her cell phone immediately, and got a meeting for the next day in the morning.
“So what is it you want me to make you do?”
“I want to solve my problems without meeting them face to face”
“Do you want me to make you fearless?”
Jessica had second thoughts on that. She was happy being antisocial and quiet and afraid. She just didn’t want to face anything with her eyes open. So, she came up with her request.
“I want to be able to solve my problems while I’m sleeping”
“You mean, say, sleep walking?”
“Sure. I just want to do what I feel without waking up”
“Alright”
The hypnotherapist did their job, and convinced her to do exactly as she asked; she would do what she truly wanted while she slept. She went over to her apartment after work that day to hear more hammering and sawing from Buck’s apartment. Jessica fell asleep and was out like a light, as usual.
Now, the phrase ‘Be careful what you wish for’ couldn’t be more true that evening. Around an hour after Jessica fell asleep, she began sleep walking. She was still asleep, but walking about, determined to stop the noise. But she didn’t get hypnotized to do it a certain way. Jessica sleep-walked to Buck’s door and knocked. Buck stopped what he was doing and opened it, and Jessica just walked in, not responding to Buck’s “What are you doing”’s and “Get out of my apartment”’s.
She walked to the center of the apartment and picked up the object that had been being built and carved by Buck; a round, incomplete bar stool without a cushion. Jessica sleep-picked it up, and walked right up to Buck, and swung the stool right into Buck’s head. The stool was strong enough to survive, and Buck was on the ground, covered in blood and splinters, with a concussion. Jessica wailed on Buck for a while more with the stool until the point where he was dead for certain.
When she assumed him dead, she put the stool back where she picked it up from and walked to her bed to continue sleeping. She couldn’t control a thing. She just murdered an innocent (but loud) carpenter, all while enjoying a nice little dream. She woke up the next morning to find police all around Buck’s apartment, and paramedics taking his corpse out of the room.
Needless to say, Jessica was caught and arrested right on the scene when the cops saw the blood and wood scrapings on her hands. She bawled her eyes out, and was right off to jail after a hopeless trial. A sad story for a sleeper, but she still was happy in the end; she got a good, quiet night’s sleep every night from then on. After the first night in the big house, the guards walked in to see Jessica’s bunk mate beaten to death by Jessica, and so she was put into solitary confinement. When she slept by somebody who made a noise, she killed them and went back to sleeping, so being away from people, she could sleep as long as she wanted. And until the day she died, that’s what she did.
