The Witching Hour

This thing. This thing materializes from shadow. Its limbs grow and its flesh molds into shape, feeding off of the dark and the shadows. When it’s only 3 hours after midnight, and your eyelids flutter ever so slightly. Never opening wide enough to catch a glimpse of the growing creature in the darkest corner of your bedroom. The minutes drift slowly by. It grows and grows and grows. It’s obsidian arms spiraling all around your room, slithering across the floor and the walls. They hiss against the paint, not loud enough to wake you but loud enough to allow the sound to creep into your mind. It slowly turns your dream into a terror. The soft frown that falls between your brows only sanctions the dreaded grin from the creature.

The smile stretches across its whole face, teeth that give the illusion of steel daggers glinting in the pale moonlight. The grin shrinks its beady eyes down to little slivers it can barely see out of. It basks in its work, that frown between your brows.

The darkness has allowed its full growth. The ceiling of your bedroom wasn’t made for the hellish creatures the lack of light creates. It hunches, only allowing it to become more acquainted with the shadows of the corner.

You stir.

It throws its head back in glee, watching the uncomfort of fear slowly overtake your sleeping skeleton. Finally from the corner it moves. Your bed lies right in front of it. It knows too closely and the purity of something human will burn, but the idea of the delicious pain is too strong. It creeps closer, it’s legs snaking over the things adorning your floor. Dirty laundry, textbooks. Things that will catch your eye in the afternoon, unbeknownst to you that they’ve been touched by evil.

There you lie. Frown now deep, etched in the lines of your face. It’s joyous, nearly blissful amusement at your frightened state only heightens your nightmare. It builds off the greatest fears that lie back in the cobwebbed corner of your mind. It brings them forward in its sea of dark to be actors in your nightmares, only to watch you writhe an ache for its own mirth.

The minutes have drawn on, now closer to the rising of the savior sun. The moon is its close friend, but the sun.. Oh, no. The sun.

Its alarm at the oncoming of morning only makes it work faster. Now it's flanking the four corners of your bed. It’s body so massive that it covers any moonlight that was illuminating you. The invisible halo of sheer human begins to poke through the folds of fear it’s created. It burns and hisses against the creature’s hazy shadows, but what sort of monster would it be if it let that stop it? You let out a whimper, still in the depths of sleep, your nightmare reaching a point of pure horror.

If one were to stumble through your closed door and witness the scene taking place, they’d fall to their knees, clawing out their eyes with their bare hands.

It nearly rests on top of your chest now. The burning of two different realms entirely is aggressive against the vapor of its being. You’ve begun to mutter incoherent phrases, every nightmare you’ve committed to memory all balled up into one. Playing like a movie behind your eyelids.

The sweet, honey breathe of innocence and cleanliness, being inhaled by the creature now practically toying with strands of your hair. Soon the sun will peek over the horizon, banishing it down to the depths. Farther down than anyone would imagine to go. Where it shrieks and claws at stone. Throwing itself against the walls of the harshly lit room it’s kept. Where it’s not fully grown. Where they breed it in light, to grow in the dark of your bedroom. To be at its absolute best when it’s time to cause fear like you’ve never felt. Where it waits, to feast on that fear.

The height it reaches as your unease hits the highest level is incomparable. Now perched on your chest, the stinging of what’s not allowed no longer singing how it did before.

It laughs.

A deep, grating rumble that is fear itself. The sound when you’re watching a horror film all alone. While the rain crashes down outside and bodies of ditsy teenagers get sliced up on screen. Its rumbly laugh filters its way in. That feeling that you get when the film feels too real and you know there have to be some eyes peering at you from the darkness. You owe it all to the infernal chuckle of the creature that loves you better than any lifelong partner you could find.

Slowly, it all begins to unravel. Your quickened heart rate starts to pump backwards in a way, returning to its necessary duty. The creature feels this shift when it senses the blood that was previously pumping feverently in your veins begins to flow normally.

Despair begins to come over it as it realizes the night is coming to a close.

The sun licks the horizon gleefully, casting an orange-ish glow over the world. The creature initiates its return to below, unwinding itself from the layers of your mind. It hurries so as to be ready and away at the onset of the final phase in the human nightmare.

The tears.

Human tears are like acid to the creature. Even from far away they hurt. The feeling, the smell, even the look of them glistening on your cheek is painful. It creates holes in the dark and foggy mist of the creature, holes that aren’t easily repaired.

It folds back into itself, shrinking and cracking to fit into the sliver of darkness remaining in the corner, shying away from the growing sunshine.

As it does this, your mind kicks back into motion after being shut down and taken over. The stress and realization of the event you’ve just been through and the impact you’ve been under triggers that emotional reaction that the creature is set on avoiding.

Tears silently flow down your cheeks, getting caught in the grooves of your lips, sliding under your chin, and dripping onto the bed sheets.

The creature, now as thin as a sheet of paper, lets out a parting hiss before sliding soundlessly into nothing.

It’s this hiss that grabs you from the now light folds of slumber, your eyebrows raised high on your forehead at the surprise of tears. You’re only able to remember small bits of the nightmare, and if anything you’re more frustrated that you’re woken up this early.

But down deep where no one cares to search, the creature that shared its night with you will never forget the delicious terror you fed to it.