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In 1830, desperate for money, Londoner Alfred Bell steals a freshly-buried body to sell to an anatomy school. In the dark, he does not notice the inscription on the tombstone: May He Who Disturbs My Sleep Be Forever Denied His Own.

Stolen Slumber follows the curse through eight successive generations of Alfred's descendants, as it damns them each to a life of sleeplessness.

Review

"Legacy is an epic romp through Great Britain during the last 150+ years, as seen through the eyes of an entire lineage of insomniacs."

—Gaoler, Amazon reader

Sample chapter: © David Andrew Westwood 2026, all rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

4: Lewis Lawson

Without sleep, Lewis has read somewhere, the human body can normally last no more than eleven days. How he survives beyond this is to periodically enter a state in which his senses no longer send input to his brain and his body enters a sort of suspended animation. This last-ditch survival mechanism is not enough to make up for the lost sleep, but at least it serves to keep him alive. When seated, these states merely make him sag, but while standing they are a different matter.

Sometimes these sudden lethargies happen at home, and Lewis collapses to the carpet. At times like this, Ada and Bernadine have learned to simply cover him with a blanket and wait. After one of these “turns,” as they refer to them, he always returns to consciousness like an epileptic, disoriented and weak.

Some of these limbo states happen at work, however, sometimes when he is in the middle of monitoring the current. After this happens a few times, and outages at the railway persist longer than they need to, his employers decide he can no longer be relied upon for such a critical task. They assume he suffers from shell shock, and reluctantly demote him to one of the team that checks the third rail and its porcelain insulators, explaining that this is a strictly temporary solution until he “recovers fully.”

Lewis is reluctant to tell his family this, and waits for the right time.

The men he works among now are unskilled, not engineers. They ply their trade during the small hours of the night when no trains run, trudging mile after mile along dank and dimly-lit tunnels filthy with grime, swinging their lanterns to look for problems—broken cables, bent rails. Lewis’s malady follows him even here, however, and more than once he blacks out and staggers, having to sit next to the tracks until full consciousness returns.

One day the inevitable happens. He is noting the position of a cracked insulator, his overcoat damp from the drips from the tunnel roof, when the rails blur before his tired eyes. His muscles go limp, and he collapses. But this time he falls against the third rail. Unwittingly, he has lost track of time and not realized the day’s train service has begun, the 600-volt current switched on for the day.

He is killed instantly by the medium in which he specialized.