Hey, my name's Otis Cry, and you're listening to Sleepy.

A podcast where I read old books to help you get to sleep.

And this is a midweek bedtime story for you.

As I said in last Wednesday's episode, I'm very happy to be bringing you these short stories in the middle of the week.

Little full stories that have a beginning and an end to kind of keep you

sleepy until the Sunday episodes come out.

And I'm very excited to be reading this one to you today.

It's a story by one of my absolute favorite authors,

Edith Nesba.

As always, the music you're hearing is by my good friend James Lepkowski.

The cover art for Sleepy is by Gracie Canaan.

Our regular longer episodes will keep posting every Sunday as always.

And those will be episodes that have longer intros where I get to thank our Patreon members, which is a place where you can go and pledge

a couple bucks for an ad-free version of the show.

And these that you're hearing right now, these are just going to be shorter episodes. I really hope you like these short

stories. This one tonight was a really fun one from Edith Nesbitt's collection, The Book of Dragons, and it is called

The Island of the Nine Whirlpools. I really enjoyed reading it. So I really hope you like going to sleep to it. And now is the time for you to fluff up

your pillow just how you like it.

Feel yourself melt into your bed.

Get real comfortable.

Close your eyes and let me read to you. The Island of the Nine Whirlpools, the Dark Arch The dark arch that led to the witch's cave was hung with a black and yellow fringe of live snakes.

As the queen went in, keeping carefully in the middle of the arch, all the snakes lifted their

...