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had scars and blemishes, patches red and raw, some rough, and worst of all, impenetrable. 

Chapter Five
    John pushed the drawer that housed his keyboard into the desk and leaned back in his leather chair. The glare of the computer screen was drying out his eyes. With a click of his mouse, he downloaded the changes to his paranormal website, fearnone.com . It took about three minutes for all of the edited files to fully transfer. Just a few years before, he was an internet moron. If you’d asked him what version of Explorer he used, he would have cracked a joke about Columbus or Lewis and Clark. A few classes in html, Java and Photoshop later and he was his own web designer. Sure, he had the money to hire a team of designers, but the learning and the effort that it took to maintain a good site were welcome diversions from his inner life.
    He never claimed to be an expert in the paranormal. He was just a guy with a burning curiosity who happened to turn himself into a decent web designer. Anne’s death and his sudden fortune gave him the desire and flexibility to make this a full-time gig. 
    He’d just added a new case study of ghostly presences complete with pictures of supposed ectoplasmic emissions from a hospital in Iowa. This particular hospital had been the center of a rash of otherworldly sightings for more than forty years. Doctors, nurses, patients and visitors had all been witness to a host of evanescent shapes, disembodied voices and telekinetic activity. John had been contacted through his website a few months ago by one of the hospital’s administrators who had asked if there was anything he could suggest they do to rid themselves of the unexplained activity. He explained to them that he was no ghost buster, but rather a hunter and gatherer of information. He promised to devote a section of his website to their plight and see what he could do about generating interest among the few reputable people that eradicated supernatural entities for a living. 
    As a paranormal hunter, John’s primary objective was to seek out odd phenomena, study it and make it available to the public. Over the last couple of years, fearnone.com had attracted a lot of attention. He’d been interviewed by quite a few magazines and offbeat radio shows, especially because of his unique angle as a lottery winner who was using his money in such an unconventional way. His credibility was strengthened by the fact that he endeavored to make zero dollars from his efforts. Unlike a few others in this line of work, he didn’t charge people consultation fees or sell shirts or create museums of the bizarre that one could enter for a fee. Any money that he received for his articles written for magazines like Spirit, American Haunting and Fate was donated to charity or dropped in the collection plate at Sunday mass. 
    John stretched his arms and yawned. 
    Sleep was no longer a habitual, mechanized function in John’s life. The heavy pull of impending sleep brought anything but tranquility and a desire for pleasant dreams. A year after Anne had died in her sleep of what the doctors termed natural causes, her heart had just inexplicably stopped, John experienced his first bout of insomnia. It had lasted a week and started one night as a simple inability to shut his brain down. Snippets of past memories, to-do lists for the coming week, the unrelenting repetition of a particular song chorus, usually a song that he hated, all jack-booted their way across the landscape of his subconscious and refused to be silenced. 
    By the third sleepless night he had become hyper-conscious of his breathing patterns as he lay in bed, praying for sleep. Any odd heartbeat or fluctuation in his respiration gave rise to a panic that thrust him back to being fully awake. Just as he would fall asleep, he’d awake gasping for air like a drowning man. He was convinced that his heart would stop beating while he slept, just like Anne’s. A part of him knew this wasn’t