You Up?

As a child, I hated the dark. The way it made the air seem like a thing: an entity that could choke and confine me, make my cheerful room with its lavender-flowered wallpaper take on a sinister bent. I imagined the sinewy hands that could at any time stretch out from behind my curtains, tearing at my clothes and flesh. I saw disembodied eyeballs floating in my window panes – likely just reflections of light, but try telling that to a ten year-old. There were times when I quite literally believed I felt the presence of evil.

Given my chickenheartedness, I craved the most quick and oblivious surrender to the sandman. And once I fell asleep, I wanted to stay asleep. Waking would force me to face the terror of the night. The ghosts, vampires, demons, and monsters that I was sure lurked under my bed, in my closet, on my ceiling, in my very soul.

But falling asleep wasn’t always a grace.

I have vivid recall of the nightmares that plagued my childhood years. The hungry pool drain that would suck me into its abyss, the vicious swarm of killer bees that terrorized me and my poodle, the quicksand I would fall prey to in my backyard. Even in sleep, it turned out, I couldn’t always escape my fears.

But fears have a way of fading, not only with the crack of dawn, but with the passage of time. Like many school-age grinds – sitting through Catholic mass comes to mind – they can take on a very different character in adulthood.

In my youth, the struggle was with succumbing to sleep right after I’d turned out the lights. Those minutes that could feel like hours when I was wrapped in my cocoon of blankets, clutching my crucifix, and praying I’d make it until daybreak. Hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to get up to pee, only to start the minacious process of falling asleep all over again.

In my adult years, especially since I became a mother, and getting up in the middle of the night was par for the course, there was a decided shift not only in my sleep patterns, but more remarkably, in the way I experienced the night.

When my children were babies, nocturnal wakings were jarring and often difficult. I was plain exhausted, yet would stir at the faintest noise – any indication that one of my infants was hungry, sick, or just lonely for company. I’d zombie-walk to their cribs, dragging my feet, wearing a thousand-yard stare, like one of the creatures I’d hoped never to encounter when I was a kid.

But once I caught sight of my squirming mound, the tiny fingers grabbing at the rails – my fatigue all but left me. The after-hours became a time that was just for me and my littles. I hardly thought at all about the more ominous qualities of the dark during those midnight calls. Whatever monsters had prowled my imagination in the years before my babies were born were no match for this mother’s protective impulses anyway.

Jan Saudek, Mother and Child

It was in those sleepless years, when my frights were obscured by love and biological imperative that my relationship with the dark began to change.

I guess it had to.

Even long after my children had grown accustomed to a heavy, uninterrupted slumber, my mind and body continued colluding to awaken me at the slightest noise. I’d end up being up in the middle of the night quite a bit. At first, this was a frustrating development. I’d been looking forward to a full night’s sleep for years, only to have it denied by…nothing in particular.

It became such a nightly phenomenon, that my husband began calling the hours between one and two in the morning, the time when I invariably found myself staring into the inky black, my witching hour.

By definition, at least according to Merriam-Webster, the witching hour is an hour when “supernatural events are thought to occur; the time late at night when the powers of a witch, magician, etc., are believed to be strongest.”

While I don’t feel particularly powerful or witch-like when I’m up in the night, I have found that time to be a source of magic. As a child, it was a macabre magic – melodramatic in its potential for occultist devilry, and utterly disconnected from more real-world dangers of nightfall. Ones like burglaries, house fires, and freak storms that might sweep a sleeping household away.

As a woman, a mother, my witching hour has been far more filled with the commotion of nature and small town life, than ghostly moans and chain-rattles. The din that drifts in through my open window includes the caw of a night bird, the croak of a bull frog, a train rattling by, maybe a distant siren, a screaming fox, a whoosh of wind, the shiver of a tree branch heavy with leaves. From inside the house, there are pipes clanging, floors creaking, the pitter of rain on our metal roof, laughter and music coming from my children’s bedrooms.

Sometimes, I’ll hear my phone ping.

“You up?” My oldest daughter, a night owl, will text me.

On these nights, my witching hour becomes a time of private jokes, sweet, childlike snuggles I would never get during the day, and secrets that come spilling out as if I’d cast a truth-telling spell. About crushes and crushing fears. What if I fail? Should I end a friendship that’s become toxic or try to reform it? How can I control my grimmest thoughts and impulses? Will I ever find someone to love me? As I whisper my responses, I quite literally feel the love in my heart as if it’s corporeal – heavy, magnetic, radiant.

My cover illustration for The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories.

Then, there are the nights my witching hour lives entirely in my head, producing hours of streaming content devoted to my specific flights of the imagination. Ones of captivating people fully versed in enchantments and intrigues, who go on to inhabit wild, bold worlds. The damsels in distress, superbaddies, warriors, wretches and libertines that stalk the ancient palaces, infinite deserts, and craggy mountains of my fantasies. Historic events are relived, reimagined, or entirely contrived. All of these threatening to find their way onto my blank computer screen come morning.

I make it to the Hugheses’ house without incident and fall into bed after the bare minimum of a toilette. My breath slows, my mind clears as if swept by a diligent maid. But soon, the empty room that housed my thoughts becomes filled again. Not with images from my day, my life, but with a foreign world that has always inhabited my dreams. A world of people and histories that I can’t possibly know, but who feel as intimate as my own beating heart. I hear a laugh, and a voice as devoted as a caress.

“It always takes you time to warm to me, you know,” he says.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Oh, no. I always love you from the first.” Tonight I don’t see him, but hear only his voice. Yet, he’s here. So close that I long to fling myself into his arms. To stay in my night world and never wake up.

— excerpt from “Of Sand and Bone,” coming this Christmas.