The Calling - Audio

Chapter One: Not again, Alice thought. It was happening again, and she couldn’t stop it.

If I could just stay awake, she moaned to herself.

But that was an impossible task. She had tried countless times, and now she was so tired she was dizzy from exhaustion. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel, and the traffic lights blurred into watercolor smears of red and green.

She was falling asleep. The tiny bit of still-functioning logic kicked in: she couldn’t make it home. There was no time.

Alice pulled into the back corner of the 24-hour gym parking lot, under the security camera but away from the entrance.

She’d done this enough times to have a system. Lock the doors. Recline the seat. Tuck her purse under the driver’s seat. Check the locks.

The exhaustion, or the desire to sleep, pulled at her like a riptide. It always scared her. How could it not?

After all, she didn’t know what happened to her body when she left it behind to go live in someone else’s. Did someone take hers over? She rather doubted it because it always was where she left it when she returned to it, and nothing seemed disturbed.

She often wondered if the person felt tired after she left their body and returned to hers. Did they even know that she was there? Maybe she just drove them around like a car, and they weren’t aware that she was doing it.

Three years of this. Three years of moving into the life of a stranger when she fell asleep.

The first time, she’d been nineteen, home from college for winter break. She’d fallen asleep in her childhood bedroom and woken up on a skateboard, legs pumping, a teenage boy’s hands gripping the board beneath her—his—feet. Her panic had been electric.

She’d bailed off the skateboard, scraping his knees, stumbling into a fence, gasping, screaming with vocal cords that weren’t hers. But she had stopped him from going off the cliff.

She didn’t know if he had been heading there on purpose or if he hadn’t known it was there. Either way, she had stopped him. As soon as he stopped, bruised but still alive, she had snapped back into her own body so violently that she’d fallen out of bed.

She had thought it was a nightmare. And it hadn’t happened again for years, so she had written it off as a onetime thing. But then three years ago it started again, and hadn’t stopped.

At first, she’d tried to tell people. After the skateboard incident, she had told a friend, who had scoffed at her and said that was impossible; she was just a vivid dreamer. Hadn’t she ever heard of lucid dreaming?

“It’s not the same thing,” she tried to protest, but gave up when her friend just shook her head at her.

Her mother had looked at her with such worry that Alice had backtracked immediately, laughed it off, blamed it on stress and too much caffeine.

When it started again, she had gone to the doctor, described it carefully as “vivid dreams,” and been prescribed sleeping pills that only made it worse—knocked her out so deeply she could barely function when she woke up in someone else’s body.

So she’d learned to live with it on her own, if living was what this constant fear of where she’d go next could be called living.

She worked from home as a freelance graphic designer with flexible hours, so there was no one asking why she looked like death most mornings. She’d lost friends who couldn’t understand why she was always too tired for plans with them.

She’d broken up with her boyfriend when she couldn’t explain the dark circles, the exhaustion from worrying, the way she’d sometimes look at him and wonder what he would do if she told him. The loneliness was almost worse than being in someone else’s body. Almost.

Alice’s phone buzzed. A text from her brother:

Still on for dinner Saturday?

She stared at it. Saturday was four days away. Would she still be functional by then? She was running on fumes already.

“Maybe. I’ll let you know,”

she typed back.

The truth was simpler: I’m losing my mind and I can’t tell you why.

Her eyes were closing. No choice now. The parking lot tilted, and her view of the dashboard faded. She checked the lock button one more time, a muscle memory of self-preservation, before sleep dragged her under.

Please, she thought. Please let me wake up as myself. Please let my body still be here.

The last thing she saw was the gym’s neon sign flickering in the dark: “24/7 FITNESS—ALWAYS OPEN.”

Then nothing.

Hours later, Alice gasped awake in her car. It was still dark. She was back in her own body. Her phone showed 2:47 AM. She’d been asleep, or gone, for four hours.

All she could remember was moving out of her body and into someone else’s. She had a vague memory of walking the body into a hospital and getting help. She could still hear the sound of people running toward them, and smell the antiseptic aura that hospitals always had.

She wasn’t sure if she didn’t remember more than that because she couldn’t remember or didn’t want to remember. Either way, she was tired of it all and wondered how much longer she could go on if her life was always going to be like this.

She needed help, but where was she going to get it?

Her phone buzzed again. This time from an unknown number.

“We can help if you’re tired of being alone. We have been waiting for you.”

Below it was an address and today’s date at 6:00 PM. And one more line:

“You’re not going crazy. You’re a Mapper.”

Alice stared at the screen until the words blurred. Years of thinking she was losing her mind, of exhaustion, of fear, and of isolation.

And someone—multiple someones—knew. Was it a joke? Was this a con? A mapper? What the hell was a mapper?

Her finger hovered over the delete button.

Then she took a screenshot instead, in case the message disappeared, so she could prove it had been there.

The address was across town. When she looked it up, she discovered that it was a community center. A public place. That made it feel a little safer. She had fifteen hours to decide if she was brave enough—or desperate enough—to find out who these people were.

Alice started the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and drove home on autopilot. The decision already made.

When you’ve been drowning, even a stranger’s hand looks like salvation.

Alice wasn’t sure if she was more worried that it was a trick or if it was real. Either way, she needed to know.