Witching Hour

The first time I heard them was when I was about twelve. I went to bed at nine and soon fell asleep. After a long day at school and a lot of hide and seek with my friends, I was dead tired. Nights already became hot as June was creeping closer, but not even that could keep me from sleeping. Not even my parents arguing downstairs, as it had happened many times before.

I woke in the middle of the night and at first I heard nothing unusual. But then, the sound of faint breathing hit my ear. Right away, my heart began beating fast, and my body froze. I held my breath and listened. Crickets chirped outside, and the whippoorwills were especially noisy. Even so, I was hearing somebody breathing in the room.

I was lying motionless under the thin cover. Sweat was drenching me from head to toe as I tried to figure out what was happening. I was sleeping on my left side, facing the bedroom door. The window was behind me. Despite the room being well lit by the moon, I saw nothing. I thought maybe whatever was breathing was behind me. Turning around was out of the question.

I thought about screaming, but then I would have woken up my parents. My mother was not the problem, but my father could be really grumpy when woken up, so I decided against risking a spanking or causing another fight between them.

After a while, either the breathing stopped, or I fell asleep somehow. When I opened my eyes in the morning, the night’s experience came back to me. I froze again and listened. Nothing. I sighed, then I slowly turned. The room was filled with bright sunlight. Then I realized it was Saturday, and I was already feeling restless. I couldn’t wait to have a quick breakfast and head out to play with my friends.

When I went downstairs, I saw my mother sitting alone at the table. She had an obvious hundred mile stare, and I knew why. My dad had already gone out with his friends, but not to play. He had a well-established routine, and we all knew it. He would come home after midnight, staggering, blubbering, and reeking like a barrel of draff.

I kissed my mother on the cheek, which painted a smile on her face, ate breakfast, then headed out. Playing with my neighborhood friends was one of the few activities which I loved. It also made me forget the bad stuff which was happening at home. When the weather was bad, I occupied myself with either reading or watching the television. I didn’t really like watching the TV in my room because it was small. My father considered that a small kid needs a small TV, so there was no reason to spend money on a bigger one. Of course, he had money to buy booze, play poker, or to pay strippers.

Me and my friends were out all day. Our house was at the edge of town, and not far away, there was a small wooded area. We were spending most of our time there, under the protective shade of the trees. But when I went home, different kinds shadows came upon me.

My father came home, and of course, he was wasted. The usual argument broke out. I was already in bed, thinking about last night. I was afraid to fall asleep, but when I was close to drifting away, I heard the shouting downstairs.

Fortunately, it did not last long, and I fell asleep. I woke up later, same as last night. Everything was silent, except the breathing. But this time, I also heard whispers. I was desperately hoping that I was just imagining sounds, but after several minutes of holding my breath and listening, I was sure they came from the room.

Of course, I panicked, but I dared not move. Sweat was drenching my body and my heart was jumping out of my chest. I began praying, but it seemed like God was on vacation because it had no effect at all. I think I lay there for about half an hour or so before the whispers finally stopped. After several minutes, I gathered enough courage to move. I reached for my bedside lamp and switched it on. Nothing. The room was empty. Then I looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was 04:12 a.m.

I couldn’t fall asleep anymore. Ghosts, I thought, ghosts were haunting our house, like in the movies. I had a great urge to tell my mother, but I feared she will think I was crazy. Also, I didn’t want to give my father a reason for another argument.

I had breakfast and headed out, but not to play. I headed straight to one of my friend’s house. His mother had all kinds of books about occult stuff and I figured I might find out what was happening to me. This was at the end of the pre-internet era, so books were pretty much the only source of information out there. She gladly lent me some of her books and was happy I had an interest in the subject. I didn’t want to tell her either. She was a really talkative person, and everybody knew she couldn’t keep a secret.

As my father was out again, and my mother was watching the TV, I went up into my room unbothered. The first book I took into my hands was ‘When Two Worlds Meet’ by Mary A. Fletcher. She was a parapsychologist. In it, she talked extensively about the ‘witching hour’, which is the period between 03:00 and 04:00 a.m. During this time, the barrier between our world and the spirit world is the thinnest, so it is a period of high spiritual activity. She also mentioned that some people are more sensitive than others, and the spirits are drawn to them. I was wondering if I was sensitive or not, since they had never been drawn to me before. Now, I know.

Back then, it frightened me. Knowing that I may hear and see souls of dead people, also not knowing what they wanted, was terrifying.

Again, I didn’t want to tell anyone. I thought about waiting to see if it goes away. It didn’t. When bedtime came, I decided to sleep with my bedside lamp turned on. It gave me some feeling of security. I still woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of whispering and raspy breathing.

The air was cold and oppressive, and my skin erupted in goosebumps. I felt them in the room. I saw nothing yet. My vision was hazy, but my instincts signaled me that there was a threat in the room.

That was when something in the shadows started moving. I froze and hoped with all my heart that it was just a trick of the mind. But it wasn’t. A dark human shape made a menacing step toward my bed from one of the opposite corners.

I screamed at the top of my lungs. The shadow drew back, but not because I screamed, but because hurried footsteps came from the stairwell outside. My chest was heaving wildly when my mother stepped in.

She immediately rushed to me and embraced me. My father’s heavy steps came a few seconds later.

‘What happened, honey?’ she asked. ‘Did you have a bad dream?’

‘No. It was not a dream,’ I replied, but I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore. ‘I saw somebody in the room.’

‘Nobody’s in the room,’ my father replied. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Don’t! Just leave him alone, please. He had a bad dream.’

‘It wasn’t a dream. I saw somebody right there,’ I said and pointed. ‘I was awake, and the lamp was on. I saw somebody.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ my father replied, ‘the windows are shut, there’s no place for anybody to hide in here. And why are you sleeping with the lamp on?’

‘I’m afraid,’ I said while tears were flowing from my eyes,′ I’ve been hearing breathing and whispers at night.′

‘Oh, my God,’ my mother said, and tried to comfort me by caressing my cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry. We’ll figure it out.’

‘I think I already figured it out,’ my father said.

He was checking the windows when he stumbled upon the pile of books on the other side of the bed. He took the pile up in his brawny bricklayer’s hands and looked at each of the books with thick, furrowed brows.

‘When Two Worlds Meet,’ he said, then threw the book onto the floor. ‘Signs From The Other Side’. Thump! ‘Hour Of The Witch’. Thump! ‘Shadow People’. A louder and final thump.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘Leave him alone, please! He is frightened.’

My mother tried to stop him, but he ignored her.

‘Of course, he’s frightened! Look at all this shit! How can he not be frightened when he’s reading this crap? Reading books for school is what he should be doing.’

‘I tried to find out what was happening to me. I’m sorry!’ I said in a hiccuping voice.

‘Maybe he’s just afraid to talk to us,’ my mother said, and I admired her courage.

‘What? Are you afraid to talk to me?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘Well, here I am. Talk to me! Don’t be such a wimp!’

‘Stop it!’ my mother shouted.

‘You don’t tell me what to do,’ he said while pointing menacingly at her. I noticed her eyes were wet, and she was struggling to hold back. ‘And it’s time for both of you to listen. This goddamn circus will stop once and for all. At his age, I was helping my father lay bricks in this town. I had no time for ghosts and stupid books because I was building houses. I’m not busting my ass at work all day, so I come home to ghost stories and whining.’

‘What about busting your ass at the bar with your idiot friends, drinking and playing poker all night? Is that how you take care of us?’

His eyes flashed with fire, and his face distorted in a grimace of indignation. The slap followed, and it was a powerful one. It hit my mother on her right cheek. Her head bumped into mine, and we both fell to onto the bed.

‘I put food on the table, so you two don’t starve! I drink and play whenever I please to!’

He headed towards the door, then stopped and turned to us.

‘No more lamps during the night, unless you pay for it.’

He then stormed out of the room, but my mother remained with me. We both cried for some time, then lay silently embracing each other. Then a shallow and troubled sleep came, but at least the spirits did not bother us.

In the morning, I went to school, but didn’t talk much to anybody. Didn’t care. My father left for work early, as usual. My mother called in sick, because her face was blue and swollen. She didn’t want to present herself like that at the post office, where they employed her as a clerk. In a few hours, the whole town would have known that she’d been beaten up by her loving and caring husband, who was struggling to put food on the table and gallons of beer in his belly.

My father came home late that night, probably drunk, and my mother was already sleeping, so there was no chance for an argument happening. I was tired both physically and mentally, so I fell asleep.

The dreaded waking during the witching hour had come, of course. I saw no shapes this time, but the whispering got louder. It seemed that several people were arguing about something. The cacophony was maddening. I stuck my fingers into my ears as hard as I could, but some of the noise still slipped through. It resonated in my head endlessly. Then, somehow, I fell asleep again.

The next day at school was hell. I couldn’t pay attention to anything and was dead tired. The math teacher called me out to the blackboard to solve a problem, but I was just stuttering and giving the wrong answers. My classmates laughed, and I was more alone than ever.

I went home, and after giving a hearty embrace to my mother, and eating a little, I went up to my room. Fortunately, my father did not throw out the books, so I could read some more. I was not in the mood for going out or watching TV.

I fell asleep before he came home, but I woke up again during the witching hour. Before opening my eyes, I was already hearing whispers. I gathered some courage and opened them. To my horror, I saw two shadowy figures beside my bed, who seemed to be talking to each other. I uttered a faint, but reflexive gasp, then both of them turned their heads toward me. They knew I was awake.

One of them leaned close to me, as if inspecting me. My bladder let go, but I didn’t even notice. I was frozen. Then one of them spoke, and the voice seemed to come from inside my head.

‘Kill him, and we will take him away,’ the figure said. ‘Don’t be afraid. He will come home soon. Kill him, and free yourself.’

And so it was, that during that night, I became friends with the dead. How ironic. Everybody seems to be afraid of the dead. Zombies, ghosts, vampires, but they are not the ones we should be afraid of. The living are the most evil, no monster can hold a candle to them.

‘Kill him,’ another disembodied voice whispered from the shadows. ‘Kill him,’ another one came from a different corner. They began to show themselves, as if materializing from the darkness itself.

‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ they whispered, but their whispers reverberated in my skull with maddening intensity.

I heard him enter the house. This time, my mother was waiting for him. I thought she probably had no more patience and decided to confront him. She did. A few minutes after my father entered the house, the argument was on. Shouts and curses flew in all directions. I almost shouted myself. He was drunk. I could tell easily by the way he spoke.

Then I heard a slap. That was it. I stood up and the spirits of the dead retreated. They watched from the shadows as I slowly opened the door to a crack; then paced to my small television. I unplugged it, then lifted it up. It felt like a piece of feather. I carried the TV to the door, opened it with my foot, then cautiously walked out.

Below me, in the hall, my mother and father were still screaming at each other. My mother was holding one hand to her cheek, and she was crying. They did not see me. My father closed in to hit her again, but she pushed him.

He staggered back a few steps, right below me. The voices began again. ‘Kill him!’ they said, and I obeyed. I lifted the TV above the wooden railing and let it fall. He was in the middle of a curse when one of the TV’s sharp corners hit him straight in the head. He fell right away. Blood was flowing from the wound while his body convulsed. My mother uttered a scream, but it was only because of the surprise. She looked at me and followed me with her gaze as I walked down the stairs.

‘Mom, I peed myself,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

‘It’s all right. Let’s get you cleaned up.’

She offered her hand. I took it, but then pointed to my father’s body, which was lying now motionless on the floor. With eyes wide open and empty, he was staring into nothingness. She looked at him for a few seconds with disgust painted all over her face.

‘He won’t mind. Come on!’

She then helped me clean myself up.

Of course, she had to call the police. Many people knew my father, so there was no point in hiding his body. The cops would have come to our house pretty soon, and would have found out everything. My mother’s plan was to tell them she killed him and wanted to send me away to my grandparents while she went to prison. But the cops were smart, and they knew right away that her story was a lie. Then, when they told me they knew I did it, I just told them the truth. The spirits of the dead had made me do it.

I stuck to the story. There was no point lying. I was a terrible liar, anyway. This was a sure ticket to a mental institution. After they did the necessary examinations, they determined I needed psychiatric care, so they took me away from my mother.

She tried desperately to get me out of there. After trying several times, she had found a lawyer who accepted to help her at a price she could afford. We’ve never had enough money, but after my father died, we had even less.

At first, she didn’t tell me what the lawyer was up to, but I saw on her face that something was not right. I found out only after getting out, and talking to the single person who would talk to me, the friend whose mother had lent me the books.

He told me that the lawyer tried to exploit my mother. He had promised her he would get me out for no charge, but in exchange for sexual favors. My mother was desperate, so she accepted, but as time went by, I was still locked up in the asylum. When she found out that she was being used, and chances were high I would not get out soon, she hung herself. I only received a letter from her. She wrote she was sorry, but all hope had left her and there was nothing more to live for.

After about ten years after her death, I finally got released. I did everything in my power to cheat their tests, so I can be free. Now, I came back to the house. It still stands, but it’s a ruin. I don’t mind. For me, it’s still comforting to be home. I am waiting for the witching hour to talk to my dead friends again. In the asylum, I haven’t seen them. I guess they were waiting for me to come back here.

Yes, they indeed came to me from the shadows. My mother was also with them. She was happy to see me. I asked her about my father, but she laughed.

‘He’s deep down in the darkness,’ she said. ‘He will never see the light again, and he will harm us no more. But you have work to do.’

‘What work?’ I asked.

‘Make them pay! We suffered enough. Time to make those who had wronged us suffer. Just remember those who laughed at you at school. Remember the abuse from the asylum and the abuse I suffered when I fought to get you out. No foul deed should go unpunished.’

‘Yes! Yes! I will make them pay.’

She retreated into the darkness. All of them retreated, but I felt they were close. Watching. I clenched my fists, then turned to the window. The glass was gone for a long time. Clouds were gathering in the sky above, and faint flashes of lightning flickered in the distance. The dead were by my side, and I’ve found my new purpose. The witching hour called for blood, and I already knew who the first victim will be.