The Witching Hour

The clock chimes twelve times when midnight arrives.

From its eternal resting place on the hallway of the second floor, the grandfather clock and its first chime hails a hot, heavy darkness inside Madeline’s chamber. She measures the man and derives that he is as tall as a bedpost and as broad as a shade. He is too tall to be the physician and too broad to be her brother. And his eyes are the deep color of the late hour. They are on her face where her mouth is open wide enough for her breath to be sucked out by the mere sight of him. She feels him blow it back to her. Hot and heavy. And dark.

As if waiting for the second chime of the grandfather clock, he cushions his knee at the food of her bed, a black dent in the white duvet. Old Professor Canning would never. He would stand off to the side, on the moth-eaten cushions of the armchair like the aged sage he was. He even forbade Roderick from doing the same. And her brother had grown into a coward who wouldn’t even enter the chambers of the woman he shared a womb with.

Madeline means to chide the stranger before the clock chimes for the third time. It is his queue to spread his long-fingered hand-shaped appendage atop the sheets. She means to admonish him. She ought to admonish any man who dared, but she would have to mend her voice first for it was no more than a swelling in her throat where her heart now pulsed.

The sound of the fourth chime popped the pump and blood burst out like a fresh spring throughout her body. It was a cold mountain rush that froze it over, sinking her deeper into dread.

The intruder finds inertia with the fifth chime, inclining over her bed like the linden tree leaned over her window. Even his hand seems to her the sharp and strange shade of a branch over the white rise of her covered leg. Madeline cannot move under the weight of it, of the darkness, and the led that had become of her linens.

With the sixth chime, she moves the only muscles she could and rolls her eyes towards the window. The tree is still standing beyond it, stripped naked by the late autumn winds. And the long branch that had hooked her knee is the man’s large hand.

No, he is no man. He is more than a shadow and lesser than a man. No, he is nothing like a man. He is hotter than the sun and more chilling than the night.

It makes itself at home in her bed on the seventh chime. It spreads the pitch-black ink of its shape closer to her chest where her heart soon learns it could not escape the cage of her ribs. Each chime counts down to the moment it would surrender and each echo raised the alarm louder in her ears. She had yet to summon Ronny from the bedchamber across the hall with the scream scratching at her throat, slamming against her chest, in her chest, pounding in her eardrums.

Madeline is burning when the clock chimes for the eighth time. The press of the palm atop of it is overheating her overworked heart. Now her veins blaze trails through her body, searing her senses and melting her unmovable limbs into the mattress

The beast does not wait for another chime and pushes her deeper into the feathered bed, the shape of her burning a hole in the center of it. It is nothing but darkness and the impression of a claw in the cotton of her nightgown. The sweat underneath it does not aid to cool her down, but the nightshift did cling to her skin in a damp pawprint. The professor would’ve drained the fuel to balance the humors, drawing the overheated blood, not boiling it over. Not even he had reached this deep into her chest, into the hearth of the fever consuming her.

By the tenth strike, the beast had made a home of her chest. And Madeline felt the claw graze over the valley of her breast like a doe might. What was the use in playing coy at this time of night? He had caught the hare's heart with the patience of a predator. She needn’t see the canines to feel how famished this beast was. His breath was hot and heavy. And dark.

She warned Roddy of the scratching at her door and the banging in her window. "The house must be settling," he assured her, the floorboards moaning under him from the generations that had walked over him. "It must’ve been the wind," he dismissed her as the autumn air chilled bones of the mansion. And when Madeline still had a voice, she called him a coward for not coming when she called. He had answered by employing a physician, Professor Lancel Canning, to visit his poor, sick sister daily.

When the clock chimes for one final, fatal twelfth time, all the air that she sucked into her lungs to fuel the fire is at once smothered by the icy touch of the thunderstorm.

Not a second sooner, the tree enters her room through the shards of smashed glass and invites the rain inside. It chases away the hot, heavy and dark weight of the beast. And a shriek leaps out her throat and her heart drops into the pool of acid in her stomach:

"Roddy!"

Not a second after she calls to him, Roderick storms into her room along with the scratching her old creaking wooden door against the protesting floorboards. "Maddy," he echoes her as twins ought to do. So they reach for one another same as they did since they were pulled out of their embrace and away from Mother. Ever since they were separated in this very bed, in this very chamber. In this very, very old house.

He rescues her from the long, sharp, dark claws of the branch throwing its shadow atop her white linens. The grandfather clock glares at them both as a great blue bolt lights its ancient face.

Another second and they would be in Roderick's chamber, his bed, and inside the pages of his least favorite medieval romance. Though the brave knight in his white armor will slay the dragon this time. That tall, dark-scaled, fire-breathing fiend will be snuffed out like a candle in the storm. And Madeline would be well once again.