3 a.m.

When this story happened I had nice black hair and wasn't bald like now. But I have to tell someone this story. Maybe then it will stop haunting my mind and I will drink my tea in peace.

We were fresh married and were renting a one-bedroom apartment in Ulaanbaatar. You know these nights when it is especially dark and cold? It is then when it all started.

I woke up at 3 a.m. to my wife eating loudly in bed. I waited for a few minutes, but no luck. She continued eating, slurping, and smacking. Finally, I burst out:  

“Stop smacking! If you’re still that hungry, go to the kitchen!”  

The noises stopped, but my wife didn’t respond. Then I heard her snoring.  

The next day, I braced myself for the consequences of my short fuse. But she didn’t do any of the things she usually did when upset with me. There was no layer of sugar in my tuna sandwich packed for work, and the sticker read the usual “Love you, my bear” with a heart—no inappropriate drawing or cuss words. At dinner, she also behaved normally, elbowing me every time she thought she’d made a good joke. So I relaxed. Even though she had her ways of getting to me when annoyed, we made a pretty good team. I cleaned; she cooked. I did the laundry; she took care of the plants.  

The next night, I woke up from her chewing again. Not wanting to upset her, I summoned all the patience I had and started counting sheep in my head. When the 345th sheep successfully jumped over the fence, I realized I was hearing two noises that couldn’t coexist: her chewing and smacking noisily, and her quiet snoring.  

I slowly sat up in bed and looked at my wife. In the moonlight, I saw her peaceful face. We had no pets at home, and the window was shut, so it couldn’t be coming from outside. I got up, forgetting to put on my slippers, and walked around the room to study the source of the noise. I felt a cold knot in my stomach when I realized the noise was coming from my wife. I rushed to turn on the lights.  

“What are you doing?” My voice sounded higher than usual.  

My wife woke up, squinted her eyes at the light, and looked confused.  

“What’s wrong?” she asked.  

The smacking noise had stopped. It was quiet.  

“I keep hearing you eating so loudly, but you’re sleeping!” I felt stupid, hearing how weird my sentence sounded.  

“What are you talking about? Are you dreaming?” With this, she jumped up and ran to the kitchen. I followed her. There, she was drinking water, her hand shaking, spilling it down her neck. Tears started forming in the corners of her eyes. It was no time to pressure her with questions, but I didn’t sleep until morning.  

The next night, the smacking sound continued to annoy and scare me. The moonlight was illuminatimg the wall. The small hand on the clock on the wall pointed to 3. Then something else happened that froze my blood. If I could sink into and disappear somewhere inside my mattress, I would gladly do that. Along with the chewing sounds, I heard something small that sounded like it had multiple legs running on the floor between the bed and the window. Imagine if spiders were the same size as kittens and made stomping noises every time they ran. This is how it sounded. It ran around and then stopped. My body became stiff, and I realized I couldn’t move. I don’t know if I was sleeping or lying awake and hallucinating. But in the morning, I had a strange memory of something jumping onto our bed and crawling toward us. It felt more like a dream. In the end, I half-convinced myself it was my tired mind’s tricks.  

I couldn’t tell my wife about it, as she still seemed uneasy. She didn’t talk much and had a thick frown between her eyebrows. She kept rubbing the back of her neck. When I reached for her, as usual, to massage her stiff shoulders or neck, she jerked away. I shrugged and continued eating my potatoes, too tired to try to break the tension. We ate dinner in silence and went to bed in silence.  

At night, I woke up at 3 again. That many-legged creature from yesterday was moving around on the floor beside my side of the bed. I shut my eyes so tightly that my eyeballs started hurting. I counted sheep again. After a while, that something was gone. Probably it went through the door. My wife was serious about air circulation, so we kept our bedroom door open at night.

Just as I thought of the door, some noise came from there. But it sounded different—now it was a stomping noise. Imagine if someone could walk silently but hit a stick on the floor with each step. But it sounded as if the surface of the end of the stick somehow was much bigger. It was a softer, a thudding sort of sound, not sharp and rhythmic as the one a stick would have produced. That’s how it sounded.

It moved painfully slowly across the room. I heard it stop near my wife’s feet for a moment. Very slowly, with the speed of a snail, I peeked through my half-open eyelids.

It didn’t resemble a human shape at all. It looked more like an object, a bit taller than our bed. As soon as I tried to figure out what it looked like, it twitched and started moving to my side. This is when something warm brushed against my legs. I pursed my lips in fear and shame. The last time I wet the bed was when I didn’t even remember myself. I laid motionless for hours. It went cold, and the sheet stucked to my legs disgustingly. There was no noise anymore, but I didn’t dare to open my eyes until I heard my wife getting up in the morning. To this day, I still wonder if she knew what I had done. But she didn’t mention anything about the new mattress and never asked about that beige sheet again.  

That day, I survived solely on caffeine, drinking six cups of espresso. All my library research of old mystery books yielded nothing but tiredness and desperation. When I came home, I saw my wife throwing what was left of a pillow into the trash can. It looked as if it had been attacked by a very agressive dog. I asked my wife nothing about the pillow. There were more important and stranger things to talk about. I sat her down on the living room couch. 

“So… um… last night"- I started. 

She looked at me with no expression.  

“Did you hear THAT?” I asked.  

She didn’t look surprised or scared. It was as if her darkest secret had been exposed. She buried her face in her hands.  

“The leg and the hand?” Her voice came choked through her palms.  

“The what?”  

She slowly removed her palms from her face and looked at me.  

“I have to tell you something. It will be a lot.”  

She stood up, took out a lavender bag, and handed it to me to smell. Then she brought me a glass of water from the kitchen. Four ice cubes floated in it.  

“Well,” my wife started, “you know my family has some strangeness. And…” She paused. “I never thought I’d be forced to believe it. Just like you, I thought it was nothing more than an old legend.”  

She paused again. I waited. Then she continued.  

“When my grandfather was young, he lived in a village in Siberia. One day, one of the neighbors started acting weird. He talked about spirits and said they kept coming to him at night, calling him to become a shaman. He talked to trees. The people said he was preparing to become a shaman. He isolated himself somewhere, and when he returned, he started healing people. My grandfather either got jealous of his powers or didn’t believe him and wanted to expose him—no one knows for sure what he thought—but he went to that shaman’s home at 3 a.m. and burned it down. The shaman cursed him and his descendants. We can’t rest. The shaman’s spirit keeps haunting us.”  

She looked at me seriously. The next moment, she screamed in pain, reaching to the back of her neck, but pulled her hand away abruptly, and I saw blood dripping from her finger. We stood up at the same time. She ran into the bathroom and locked herself inside. I started banging.  

“Are you okay? Open up!” I screamed.  

“It’s hungry again. You don’t want to see this—don’t come!” she screamed.  

“Come on, open up!”  

I wish I had never opened that door. I wish I had listened to her begging me not to come in—she knew what she was talking about. At that time, I thought those 3 a.m. noises were the creepiest things that could happen to us.

Oh, how wrong I was! The vision of what I saw got imprinted in my mind, and sometimes, after a long or especially stressful day, I still see it somewhere between sleeping and awakening. 

I kicked open the door and collapsed next to my wife, who was sitting on the floor in hysterics. It took a long time to soothe her. In the end, she pulled away her scarf and turned her back, allowing me to see the scar at the back of her neck. She had told me it was from surgery for a lipoma when she was nineteen.

Without warning, that scar opened up, revealing red flesh inside and a set of huge teeth that clutched. Blood still dripped down from the upper teeth. I screamed, and my ears hurt from my own screaming. I ran away from the bedroom so fast that I hit my eyebrow on the door but didn’t notice it.

I checked in a hotel. Only then did I realize what exactly I had been hearing those nights, why the pillow was destroyed, and the nature of the chewing sounds. I was just glad I had been too scared to turn on the lights. I had no desire to see the shaman’s hand or leg walking in my bedroom. Those two days were full of migraines, hand tremors, and cigarettes.  

After a couple of days, I drove home.

“Don’t apologize,” was the first thing she said when she opened the door.

We sat in the kitchen. As she did her usual domestic things, I thought I could never live with her again.

“I won’t blame you if you leave,” she said.

It wasn’t time to pretend to be a hero. I hoped I could still be able to be called a good person, but I was never noble and never pretended to be the one. I promised not to let anyone learn the true reason of our divorce. It would be “we realized we are too different,” “we fell out of love,” and other excuses. But the true reason remained silent. I told no one but you, dear reader.