Memory Bank

The Witching Hour

I think all really little kids are a little bit crazy. Not in a cutesy ‘they say the darnest things’ kinda way. I mean truly, schizophrenically insane.

I know this because I have a very clear memory, or maybe multiple memories amalgamated into one, of being a very small child lying awake in the dead of night, absolutely scared out of my mind. And something happened to me. Something I can only now attribute to genuine mental illness.

Well, okay, it was either that or a just nightmare. A totally normal explanation. But even if it was just that, and not something paranormal or psychological, the memory of the dream was formative. So, I’m going to log it here just the same. Complain all you want, but I make the rules here, and I say it’s fine and dandy. So there.

Anyway, when I was three years old, staying up past bedtime felt not just naughty, but borderline profane. I was usually in bed by eight and asleep by half past, and back then the mere idea of being conscious at midnight (the time where oogly-booglies were getting up to all kinds of nefarious shit) was acutely sinful. To be awake past midnight was unthinkable. After all, there is really no reason whatsoever for a toddler to be up at that time. In my wee mind the only people who would be up that late were murderers, werewolves, or (worst of all) pissed up neds.

Yet, on this particular night, when sleep simply would not come to me, I reckon it might well have been 4am. To be awake at 4am when you’re three is bonkers. It’s inviting chaos: like asking Michael Myers to be your babysitter. This is a time that I still find uncomfortable enough as an adult. For a child, 4am is so creepy that it drives your already-overactive imagination into a kind of frenzy.

I remember lying in my oversized bed, squeezing my eyes shut as hard as I could. I was trembling all over with guilt at being awake so late, and trying to will myself to sleep on command. You see, I’d moved out of a teeny little spare room when I got too big for a crib, and this new bedroom was actually the largest in the house overall. I think that added to the terror of everything. I was much too small a kid for the comparatively gigantic space, and that made me feel disorientated and isolated. The room’s furnishings were also, I recall, pretty sparse, since I was too young to own much stuff in the first place. Consequently, the smallest sounds seemed to be eerily magnified by the emptiness as they ricocheted off the walls.

Our house was by a main road; very long and straight. So I could hear passing cars roaring towards me like growling tigers, coming closer and closer and closer. The awful anticipation of the revving engines were too much for my nerves. The tension was almost physically painful. Because in the very centre of the road just in front of our house was a manhole cover. And when the cars would race down the track there would be a clamorous ‘clunk-CLICK’, like someone thumbing back the hammer of an enormous gun, as the tires buckled the bloody thing.

My room had no blinds or curtains back then, so illumination from the passing car headlamps would shine straight through my bedroom window and project up onto the ceiling. And as the cars sped by, these narrow searchlights — jagged angry modernist yellow shapes gliding over the rippled ceiling plaster — would twist and contort the shadows of my room; making a hundred horrible forms leer at me out of the darkness.

Every time this happened I would pull my duvet over my head and quake in terror. I don’t know why. I can’t really explain the fear I felt. It had no cause. It was simply the dread of a weak little boy all alone in the dark way past bedtime.

I’m sure I had many nights like this. But on the night this weird thing happened, the cars had been roaring past the house a lot. Like, every minute or so. Enough times, anyway, to keep me staring pop-eyed at the ceiling for what felt like a seven-day-night. And as the noise of the passing cars receded far into the distance, it ended up as a like soft whispering. It sounded to me like the angels — mumbling secrets at the very edge of hearing.

And then I remember someone saying aloud, very clearly: ‘Call-um.’

It wasn’t my mum and it wasn’t my dad. It sounded like a girl — a teenager possibly — saying it in a teasing way. Mocking me.

I know that sounds mental, and it probably was. Maybe I was so tried and out of my tiny mind with terror that I was hallucinating to fuck by this point. It’s the only explanation I have for that voice saying my name.

I was too frightened to scream. A cliché, I know, but I really did feel like speaking a would unleash something unspeakable upon me. My voice dried up and a kind of paralysis closed over me. And then, just when I was weighing up whether I was losing my mind or actually trapped in a room with some kind of hideous malevolence, I heard it again:

‘Callum!’

This time it was brisk, snappy, and far louder. It issued from no particular place; seeming to arrive from everywhere, instantly. And I think I really did actually pass out from fear that time. Either that or I was so scared by this inexplicable phenomenon

When I woke up the next day I’d forgotten all about it, or filed it away as a bad dream. And perhaps it was. But the next time I couldn’t sleep, I remembered it all as a flash, as clear as anything. For many nights after, when I was huddled under my quilt and thinking aimless nightly thoughts, I would hear the soft susurration of those angels in the passing traffic.

But I never heard the voice call my name again.