GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE BOY WHO COULDN’T SLEEP

I hadn’t really slept since we moved into the house on Church Street, even though I finally had my own room.

I mean, I slept a little, but not a deep sleep. Not dreamless sleep—the kind that washes over you and leaves you feeling whole in the morning. Every night felt like being buried alive in cotton—suffocating in slowness, dragged into a paralyzed fog where I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, but something could touch me. And every morning, I woke weaker. Like I’d run a marathon in my dreams. Like something fed off me while I lay helpless.

I was exhausted. And starting school in a new town is hard enough without feeling like crawling back into bed the moment you get up.

Mom said I was just stressed from the move and needed to “relax.” Dad blamed my screen time. My brother Jared told me it was puberty and that I was being dramatic.

But they didn’t see the marks. Thin bruises blooming like fingerprints across my temples. Or the cold sting in my bones every morning, like I was being siphoned cell by cell.

They didn’t believe me. So I stopped talking to them about it. I searched YouTube for answers. I got desperate.

So I set up a camera.

Not my phone—an old digital camcorder from the garage. I propped it on a stack of comic books, aimed it at my bed, and hit record.

I whispered into the lens:

"Come on, baby. Help me figure out what’s going on… It’s real. I know it."

That night, I crashed hard. But I kept waking up—1:00 AM, 1:35, 2:14—until eventually it was morning. My legs were numb. My mouth tasted like metal, like I’d been sucking on a nickel. A rancid, acrid smell clung to me like oil.

I scrubbed through the tape. And at exactly 3:09 AM, everything changed.

The shadows in my room stretched like they were alive. A blue light danced over me—not hovering, but coming from me. The air didn’t stir. The door didn’t open. Instead, the space around me tore open. Right from my blanket. From me.

A gash of flickering blue light split the air, bleeding mist and electricity. Something crawled out.

It moved like it didn’t belong in our gravity—long limbs twitching like wet wires. Its face was a mangled, twisting cornucopia of teeth and flesh, its features half-made, half-erased. It hovered above me in a haze of blue.

And then it started swimming through me. Like I was a pool. In and out, deeper and deeper, the more it dove, the more it looked like me.

And then I saw it—the birthmark on its neck. My birthmark.

It was me. Or something that had been me once, rotting in another world.

Its jaw hung slack, like it had screamed itself broken. From its throat came a hiss of static, and it reached for my sleeping face with hands like scorched bone.

And I opened my eyes.

The camera glitched. The feed cut to static. The thing was gone.

But something had changed. I could feel it. A seed, twitching just beneath my skin.

It didn’t come back the next night. Or the one after that. I tried staying awake. That seemed to stop it.

So on Friday, I pretended to be sick and stayed home from school. I gathered everything I could—salt, herbs, quartz crystals. Jared’s cologne. I painted a sigil on the wall. I made a circle on the bed and hung a huge Herkimer crystal around my neck.

...When 3:09 came again, I was really ready this time.

I lined the room with salt and painted a protective sigil on my wall. I lined my room with powerful herbs and burned sage in all four corners. I smeared Jared’s cologne around the door—and on me. He’d once said the thing "smelled like metal and vinegar," and I hoped the scent might confuse it. My mom was an avid collector of rare quartz crystals, AKA Herkimer Diamonds, whose massive collection I placed around me on my bed to protect me. I adorned my neck with a huge crystal necklace and settled into bed.

At 3:08, the air grew cold. The walls began to hum. I was awake.

But that didn’t matter. The seam opened again—and this time I saw it all.

The crystal pulsed on my neck and before I could move, a crack in space and time opened. From the crystal. From my chest. From the room. The thing poured out, unraveling in blue tendrils that snapped into form, a serpent of bone and misery. It screeched with a howl that sounded like a broken radio shrieking through blown speakers, and the windows trembled. It reached for me—but I moved. I stabbed it in the arm with a shard of crystal I had held in my hand all night.

It didn’t bleed. It screamed again. The electricity of its breath went right through my entire body like billions of little needles. Foam gurgled from my mouth as I twitched and writhed uncontrollably.

Its skin pulsed like jelly as it grabbed me by the wrist. It yanked me off my bed like a rag doll and dragged me across the floor. My body twisted and turned as it yanked me. Static popped and crackled as we traveled into the wall in a storm of blue energy. I closed my eyes. A bone-chilling coldness forced my eyes open and suddenly—I wasn’t in my room anymore.

The walls peeled away from reality and I was yanked halfway into a place that shouldn’t exist. The floor was ash. The sky was a pulsing wet web of tendon and muscle. We had crossed an incomprehensible threshold of reality. The thing pulled me toward it with brute force. Ensnared in a crushing grip, it grabbed my face, forcing me to turn around. A thousand versions of me stared back from cracked glass, all whispering in reverse.

In one of the shards I could see my room. Empty. It loosened its grip just enough for me to wriggle out and I lunged for the shard containing my room. Instantly I flopped onto my mattress.

But before I could even comprehend what was happening, it came after me and grabbed my leg. I kicked and tried to yell but no sound came out of my mouth.

And then it started pulling harder.

"No!" I screamed, digging my fingers into the edge of my mattress.

My bones bent. My arm stretched. Skin tore. The creature let out another horrible, synthetic wail and the room danced with an unearthly energy.

I reached with my free hand and grabbed the camera tripod. Jammed the metal leg into its face—right in the thing’s eye.

The fracture in reality trembled as the creature buckled in agony. It lunged at me and pulled as the crack began to seal. The light flickered, stuttered, collapsed.

And the portal slammed shut. On my arm.

I didn’t feel the pain at first. Just pressure. Then wet heat. Then nothing.

I stared at the stump. Blood sprayed like a hose. I gripped my arm. The room spun.

I passed out.

When I woke, it was daylight. I was in a hospital. Jared sat next to me, pale and silent. My parents were down the hall, arguing with a doctor.

My parents were baffled to find an explanation for how this happened. Several doctors came in to see me, asking me different versions of the same questions. I answered them numbly with lies. I didn’t remember what happened. I just woke up and this is how I was. Nobody believed me.

Some suspected my parents, accusing them of child abuse. Some of the nurses said I was lucky. But I knew better.

I came home from the hospital two days later. I hadn’t looked at it since that night. My arm hurt less than it did the day before, so I unraveled the bandages to inspect it. The stump had already started to change.

No scab, no scar, but a pink flesh nub sprouted. Like a plant, peeking its head above the soil as it began to grow. I wasn’t sure whether to be terrified or overjoyed. Panic struck me and I shut my eyes and let the sleeping pills just take me. I wasn’t afraid anymore—and after what I had just been through I just didn’t care anymore.

I kept it bandaged and told no one. At first it was slow growing over the course of a few days—just tingling and itching. Then the bone pushed through, like something was rebuilding itself from the inside out. I watched it happen across the next week, in horror. White stem, pink meat, stringy tendons stretching like wet vines—grew before my eyes.

When I was unable to hide the growing limb any longer, my parents rushed me back to the hospital. They admitted me and kept me under observation. Deemed a miracle of science, the doctors marveled at what was happening. By the time they discharged me, I could move my fingers again.

But over the next few days, my arm kept growing. My fingers looked like mine. Longer. Sharper. Paler. When I touched things with them, new sensations ran through my body.

Two weeks have passed since I lost my arm and this thing grew in its place. I have drawn the unwanted attention of many and now reside in a government facility under observation. I sit in a room, in a bed, staring at my regrown limb wondering if it's mine or is it his—or is it one of the other versions of me.

They have no answers. I have no answers—only questions. But since that night, my visitor has not returned. Did it get what it wanted from me? Is it done with me?

Every night, the camera still rolls, always pointing at me.

Sometimes—when I’m not paying attention—I see it move on its own. Not much. Just a twitch. Just enough to know the thing didn’t fail.

It got in. And now somewhere in a place that is cold, beyond our reality, a boy—or a thing, grew from my arm. And maybe I’m not the boy who couldn’t sleep anymore.

Maybe I’m the thing that finally woke up.

Art and story by Hal Hefner 
Produced by Catmonkey Studio