Your eyes are open and you know that you are awake but your body doesn’t respond. You can feel as if your arms and legs are thrashing to move but you lay there paralyzed. Heart beat racing, your eyes focus on the ceiling. You try to calm yourself. Your grandmother would have told you that there was a witch riding your back. You begin to feel hands pressing down on your shoulders but you don’t feel as if you are taking any breaths. It’s silly, you’re just dreaming right? There’s a scratching sound coming from beneath your bed and you hear a strange whimper.
You jerk yourself awake panting and sweating. The summer’s night air is heavy and thick. Sitting up in bed you glance at the digital clock on the night stand; it reads “3:00 AM.” Your heart is pounding and your head is throbbing. The throbbing and pounding make your eyes feel as if they are going to burst out of your skull. You slap one hand to cover your eyes as the other clumsily reaches to grab the glass of water next to the clock. Miss. You send the glass tumbling to the floor. Water spills and soaks into the carpet.
“Dammit!” you spit as you stumble out of bed, grabbing the cup and staggering into the bathroom. Your breathing is heavy as you open the medicine cabinet and grab a few aspirins. There’s a shiver up your spine as you gulp down the pills with warm bathroom tap water. For a moment, you pause, your breathing…the breathing…your head whips to the door. Your dilated pupils soak in all of the darkness and makes out the corner of an end table in the hall and photo frame hanging on the wall.
Shuffling back to your bed you feel exhausted. Waking up at 3 AM every morning for 3 weeks, interrupting the REM cycle can be quite aggregating. And to have the same paralysis before waking is very odd. Typically you’d have fallen back to sleep by now but the scratching sound reappears. You imagine what kind of rodent is nesting under your home but then it begins to whimper. Poor thing. Maybe some stray pooch has been struggling to keep her pups alive under the house this entire time. And here you were thinking about witches and ghouls. Grabbing the flashlight from your dresser you saunter into your kitchen and place a few slices of turkey meat onto a tray. You’ve done this before, take a sick animal home and nurse it to health but your mother never let you keep them.
Finding your way around to the crawl space you can clearly hear the whimpering of the animal as you crawl on your belly to get closer. A pair of glowing eyes meets your gaze and you whisper sweet nothings towards the animal to keep it calm. Using the army crawl technique you learned in elementary school, you inch closer to the animal and push the plate towards it. A breeze blows though and you catch a horrible stench. Suddenly everything feels wrongs. A normal animal would hiss or growl at a stranger approaching their vulnerable offspring. And what is that stench? You remember the flashlight in your hand. Turning it on, the light shines on the creature in front of you. Its slender dark body heaving up and down as it breathes in and whimpers out. At the end of its snout, its fangs drip with blood and there is flesh and hair in between its teeth. The scratching sounds you heard were of its sharp horns grazing against the floor boards as the beast feasted on its prey. You both stare at each other and you begin to feel hands pressing down on your shoulders but you don’t feel as if you are taking any breaths. You thrash your limbs about to scurry from under the house but you’re not moving. You’re struck with paralysis and your heart beats to run from your chest. The creature lifts a dark arm and stretches its claws mockingly slow towards you. The stench of rotten eggs, decay, burning and sulfur cloud your senses. The stench of Hell is what you conclude as your bowels release with your last breath.
The Devil’s Hour
By Jameelah Adas
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