The Watching Hour

My first four years at St Denis’s Hall Boarding School were idyllic to the point of cliché. The grounds were beautiful, the accommodation exquisite, and both staff and pupils were friendly and engaging. I didn’t miss my family too much; it was easy enough to build a new one among my classmates. Some students weren’t cut out for life at St Denis’s, and so there was always a churn of fresh faces - coveted vacancies were filled immediately from the lengthy waiting list. Though the schedule was gruelling, every day felt like a fresh adventure.

Then the insomnia began.

It crept up slowly, each night pushing sleep a little further away, as though my body was acclimating itself to endless wakefulness. I had always been an “early to bed, early to rise” type. My parents teased me about my love of sleep - my father nicknamed me Clair de Lune, humming the tune as a lullaby when I was small. At St Denis’s, lights-out at ten always meant instant unconsciousness for me.

At first, I convinced myself it wasn’t serious. I still managed to sleep before midnight, though it was already souring my mood and draining my energy. I tried remedies: warm showers, hot chocolate, and reading by lamplight. Nothing helped. Soon I was staring down every midnight, then every one o’clock, then every two.

There was no cause I could identify - no stress, no change in routine. Just night after night of lying awake in the dark dormitory while my peers slumbered peacefully.

I had always thought “the witching hour” was an old wives’ tale, a scare tactic to keep children in their beds. I had never seen three a.m. until five nights ago.

All of the dormitories had large windows that opened inward and led to narrow balconies. It was a bland and boring space, but the large windows were a blessing in the summer. Though there were three beds between me and the windows, they were large enough for me to look outside. The view wasn’t great, mostly the rooftop of the opposite wing. But there was a slice of the night sky visible and I tried counting the stars hoping it’d send me to sleep.

Maybe it was the late hour or maybe it was my lack of sleep, but the night chill seemed to rush in, and I wrapped my duvet around me even tighter. I thought I’d lost count of the stars, so I just tried starting again. There seemed to be fewer than before, which could only mean that the weather was turning and the sky was clouding over. But then I noticed the stars were going out one by one in rapid succession, like candles snuffed by an unseen hand.

How many sleepless nights before hallucinations set in? I told myself it was nothing—something to Google in the morning. Eyes squeezed shut, I pretended to sleep. If I faked it long enough, perhaps my body would yield.

Then came the sound. A window latch shifting. The whisper of a curtain.

My eyes snapped open.

There were no stars. No sky. No rooftop. Only an eye.

Sleep paralysis stopped me from screaming or running away; all I could do was stare back at the gargantuan eye, a sickly yellow colour, gelatinous and filled with pulsating red and purple veins. It couldn’t be real…could it? I was just sleep paralysis. But I could see flashes of sea green around its double horizontal pupil, dancing around like a bus-sized shadow of an infinity symbol. It blinked with two sets of eyelids, the first were milky white and horizontal like a cat, the second outer set were slimy, grey vertical lids, puffy and swollen like a corpse that had been pulled from the water. It had sparse lashes, each one as thick and as long as a basketball player.

Sleep paralysis pinned me helpless. I could only stare back into that colossal gaze, silently begging to blink, to look away, to not see.

The curtains stirred with a draft, and the eye shifted upward, revealing glimpses of the titanic form beyond: translucent grey skin stretched with veins big enough to crawl through, pores wide as dinner plates, and a nostril yawning black and wet like the mouth of a cave.

From beyond the window came a slapping, slithering sound - like a fish flopping on land, desperate to return to water. No one else stirred. Were they paralysed too? I couldn’t move my head, so I could only see the sleepers in the three beds that separated me and the abomination. Penny, Robin, Callie, I screamed their names in my head over and over, hoping to break the paralysis and let the words escape my throat. God, I don’t know how long I tried, willed my body to respond. It felt like forever. Then I saw movement on the edge of my vision. Movement at the bottom of Robin’s bed.

Not Robin. Flesh. Wet, grey, glistening.

A tentacle slid up over the blankets, tapering to a point, suckers bulbous and purple, dripping and quivering. It moved with dreadful patience, weaving across her body like an anaconda until the tip hovered above her face. Her eyes snapped open just as it struck.

The sucker sealed over her mouth. She had no chance to scream. With a whip-crack force, the tentacle ripped her from the bed, dragged her across the room, and out into the night. The gust slammed the window shut, leaving only the reek of rotting fish behind. Robin’s bed was bare; even the blanket was gone.

And still I could not move.

Eventually, sleep claimed me - if sleep it was.

In the morning, I overslept, raw-eyed and trembling. I told no one. At lunch, I asked, cautiously, after Robin. No one knew. The consensus was she had simply left in the night, unable to endure the pressure of St Denis’s. Nobody questioned it. Nobody mourned.

But I could not stop seeing that eye, that tentacle. I knew I couldn’t stay another night.

So I packed what little mattered into a bag and left. No word to anyone. Just walking. Always walking. Putting distance between myself and it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever reach home. But I have to keep walking. It’s all I can do.