The Witching Hour

by J. Fallenstein

  Rosie took the water to the couch. “Drink this.” Shaking, Omar took the glass from her. The rings under his eyes were like graves, deep and dark. “Omar, have you been sleeping?”

  Omar shook his head and took a sip of water. “I try but I keep having this nightmare.”

  “What happens in the nightmare?”

  He took a gulp of air. “I’m at the graveyard and Jack’s there. He’s throwing the football, but not to a person, to Mackie’s grave.” Omar put his hands to his face. “The ball keeps getting thrown back so I walk to the tombstone to see who’s there, throwing the ball, and it’s Mackie, dead in his coffin. But then his eyes open, except they’re all white—no pupils—and he grabs me. Then I’m in the coffin and Mackie turns into Jack.”

  “Mackie turns into Jack?” Rosie repeated, confused.

  Omar nodded his head. “Yeah, Jack and I are in the coffin and Mackie is standing above us. Only he’s not letting us out and we start sinking farther and farther into the ground . . .” A shudder rocked his body and the water sloshed in the glass.

  “I’m going to walk you home now,” Rosie said after Omar’s breathing returned to a semi-normal rate. She took out a flashlight and locked her arm through his. Linked together, they slowly made their way through the misty evening to Omar’s house. The moonlight glowed blue-white on the lawn. “Omar, why were you out for a run if you’ve been home sick?”

  “I was rested. I got some sleep. But this . . . anxiety. I needed to move.”

  They walked up the steps. Inside Mrs. Arglos stood at the window, so Rosie left him at the door. “Get some sleep and try to relax,” she said.

  As Rosie walked down Omar’s driveway a strange sound came from the trees behind Omar’s house. She turned onto the road and shined the flashlight on the still, dark trees. Something moved, big and dark. Someone was hiding in the woods, watching Omar’s house.

  “Who’s there?” Rosie tried to sound more confident than she was.

  The trees rustled. Someone was there, hiding just beyond the beam of the flashlight. “Cut it out! Jack, if that’s you, stop this. Omar’s been through enough.” Rosie’s voice shook.

  The rustling stopped, but a breeze came out of the woods. As it passed by Rosie, a low hiss came from deep in the trees. It sounded like “Heeeelp hiiiim.”

  Chapter 9

  Rosie raced home, slamming the front door behind her as she darted through the house locking the windows. She stayed up with all of the lights on until her dad came home from his meeting at midnight. Only then did she crawl into bed and drift off into an uneasy sleep. Her dreams were haunted by the hissing voice and images of Mackie chasing after Omar and Jack. Just after six the next morning her phone buzzed with a text. Groggily, she pulled it to her face.

  OMAR: Come over!

  ROSIE: What’s going on?

  OMAR: He’s here.

  Rosie’s heart pounded as she threw on sweats and ran out the door. She sprinted the three blocks through the cool, mist-filled morning. Lungs burning, she ran up to Omar’s door.

  The front door was wide open and Omar stood framed in its wooden arch drenched in sweat, shivering. As she stepped over the threshold, the strong smell of pine hit her nostrils.

  “Where is he?” she panted as she walked into the dim house and closed the door behind her.

  “He was just here,” Omar said, his lips trembing and goose bumps covering his body.

  “Mackie?” Rosie asked, but she already knew. Omar nodded. “What happened?”

  “I woke up early,” he said, his face gray. “It wasn’t even light out, but someone was outside my window, whispering my name—hissing it—over and over. I thought it was a dream at first. But it wouldn’t stop, so I rolled over and looked out.” His hands went to his face. “It was Mackie. In his jersey, sweats, and cleats.”

  “Omar,” Rosie said softly. “Mackie’s dead. He can’t have been outside your window.” But even as she said it, she didn’t know if she completely believed it. Rosie sank down to sit on the couch. Something was definitely wrong. Someone, or something, had been behind Omar’s house last night, in the dark trees, and had whispered to her.

  “I know. And I tried,” he said as he sat next to her, his voice wavering. “I tried to shake it off, convince myself it didn’t really happen. Last night I took the medicine my doctor prescribed to help me sleep and I thought I was hallucinating. I know that’s a possible side effect.”

  A wave of relief washed over Rosie. That would explain it. “You probably were, Omar. Or dreaming. It could have just been a really vivid dream,” Rosie said, but even as she did she heard the hissing voice again, this time stronger—more insistent—coming from somewhere in the house.

  “Help him!”

  She sat up and slowly looked around.

  “But when I came downstairs,” Omar said, “both the front and back doors were wide open.” He raised his eyes and looked straight at her. “Rosie, I locked those doors when I went to bed last night. Then I found . . . He left his number. He was here.”

  Rosie froze. “He left his number?”

  Omar nodded and led her to the kitchen table where sheets of homework, books, and flashcards lay in a messy heap. Sitting next to the pile were pencils arranged in a number: 44.

  Rosie stared at the pencils, unable to move. There was no way that was a coincidence. She tore her eyes from the table to look at Omar.

  “I need to go to him,” Omar whispered. “At midnight. That’s what Mackie said. Midnight at the graveyard. Go to him.”

  Rosie tried to hide her horror. She surveyed the quiet house. “Where are your mom and dad?” she asked softly, her heart in her throat.

  “Visiting Gram. They left last night.”

  She nodded and turned her back to the table, blocking Omar’s view of the pencils. “Omar, you can’t go to the graveyard. You don’t even know what all of this means.”

  “He won’t leave me alone until I go to him,” Omar sputtered.

  “But—go to him? How?”

  He still isn’t thinking clearly, Rosie thought. He can’t see how crazy his thoughts are. The guilt has finally taken its toll. But as hard as she tried, Rosie couldn’t convince herself that even she hadn’t heard the hissing voice the night before and then again just now. All she knew was she needed to keep Omar away from the graveyard. She needed to prevent him from doing whatever it was he thought he needed to do.

  “You didn’t sleep, and you’re obviously upset,” she said. “Let’s go lie down for a while.” She led him to the couch. She couldn’t leave him like this—maybe he needed to go to the hospital. “When are your parents going to be home?”

  “Noon. Around noon,” he mumbled as he reclined. She covered him with a blanket. The circles under his eyes were deep, his face drawn. In fact, he’d been looking rather gaunt these last few days . . . had he been eating?

  “Try and get some sleep,” she said, and he finally closed his eyes. She went into the kitchen, pacing back and forth in front of the table. In one quick motion Rosie shoved everything back into Omar’s backpack.

  The wind blew and a breeze came through the house as if a door had opened. Rosie sat down at the table. In the other room Omar mumbled, as if talking to someone in a dream, “The graveyard at midnight . . . I will take your place . . . your grave.”

  Rosie got up and walked to the couch. “I’ll stay here until your parents get home,” she said softly once his mumbling finally stopped. She walked through the house to look out the windows on the back door.

  All along the hallway, from the front door to the back, were dime-sized clumps of brown dirt. The kind of clumps that fall off cleats. Suddenly Rosie thought of Jack’s anger. Jack. He must have been staking out Omar’s house, waiting for him to be alone.

  Rosie kicked a clump of dirt. Jack probably laid out the pencils too. But that didn’t explain the voice—the hissing—she’d heard. That couldn’t be Jack. The voice was unlike any human voice she’d ever known.<
br />
  She pushed the thought aside. Maybe it was Jack. But if Jack was willing to break into Omar’s house to torment him while he slept, when would he stop?

  Chapter 10

  Omar’s parents came home while Omar was still asleep on the couch. “Mrs. Arglos,” Rosie said. “Omar’s been . . .” Rosie didn’t know exactly what had happened, “having hallucinations,” she settled on. “Could it be his medication?”

  “Yes. I should have considered that.” Mrs. Arglos turned to her husband. “We have to get him off it. No wonder he’s been acting strange.” She gave her husband a significant look as she left the room, prescription bottle in hand, to call the doctor.

  Once Mr. and Mrs. Arglos were back to keep an eye on Omar, Rosie marched down the street with her sights on the hardware store. She would tell that Jack Blackwell a thing or two about his twisted vengeance. Rosie was almost certain it had to be Jack. She had spent the entire time Omar was sleeping working out how Jack could have done this to Omar. It was time to confront him.

  Rosie pushed open the door to the shop and headed up the stairs. Jack was busy cutting a key. His shoulders were hunched; his eyes were sunken wells. The prank was obviously taking its toll on Jack too. He turned off the machine. His movements were slow, as if he were covered in thick syrup.

  “Jack,” Rosie said and stepped toward the counter. “You need to stop.”

  He looked up at her, his dark eyes weary. “Stop what?” he asked with a yawn.

  “This messing around with Omar, whispering to him at dawn outside his window,” she gestured to the key machine, “making duplicates of his house key and going through his house opening his doors. And the pencils, number 44? That’s creepy.”

  Jack scrunched up his face like he’d just smelled a rotten corpse.

  “Yeah,” Rosie continued, tapping her foot, “The pine smell was a nice touch.” She waved her hand in the direction of the cleaning products. “But you shouldn’t have worn your cleats this morning. The clumps of dirt gave you away.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not doing anything. I’ve been at work since five this morning unloading the new stock.” He nodded to the shelves full of winter shovels and bags of salt. “I swear I wasn’t over there. But you tell Omar that he can stop with the texting and the go to him messages all over. He needs to cut it out or there will be serious consequences.”

  “Sending you messages? Jack, I told you he’s not doing any of that. I even asked him. He’s not. I don’t know why you’d say that, except maybe to cover your own tracks. He’s messed up, for sure, but not like that. He’s so delusional with guilt he thinks he’s meeting Mackie at the graveyard at midnight tonight.”

  Jack seemed to wake up. “Really? Omar’s meeting Mackie? What does he plan to do when he meets him?”

  Rosie shook her head. “He seriously thinks he can trade places with Mackie! Jack, he would rather die than live like this, with you and the town all blaming him for what happened—for what was obviously an accident.”

  “That so?” Jack raised his eyebrows. “So full of guilt is he?”

  “Yes.” Rosie slapped her hand on the counter.

  “We’ll see about that,” Jack said and disappeared into a back room.

  ***

  The sky rumbled. Rain was coming. The gray bank of clouds hung oppressively on the edge of the horizon. Rosie’s stomach growled. She might have just enough time to grab a bite and get home before getting drenched. The red flashing letters of Dina’s lit up the dark afternoon as she walked into the little diner.

  The bells jingled and the other customers looked around. Rosie made eye contact with the father of the family in the far booth and nodded at the two farmers at the counter who spun to glance her way.

  “Look who’s back,” the waitress said cheerily. “You here for another burger? I know you liked it last time.” She flashed Rosie a smile.

  “I think I might have some chicken noodle soup,” Rosie said and collapsed into a booth near the window.

  “Coming right up.” The waitress plucked the pen from her pile of curls and wrote on her pad.

  Outside the clouds seemed to drop from the sky. The whole street grew dim. Rosie could barely see ten feet out the window. As the waitress placed a steaming bowl of soup in front of her, the bells jingled again and Omar dashed into the diner.

  “I hit him!” Omar cried. “I hit him! Somebody help!” He rushed back outside.

  Everyone jumped up at once and followed Omar out the door, through the heavy mist, to the curve of Zumbay Road. “There.” Omar pointed to something dark in the tall grass in the ditch. Lightning flashed and the street grew almost as dark as night.

  A crowd gathered as one of the farmers strode cautiously down into the ditch. He leaned forward.

  “What you hit, son,” he said, as he heaved a dark object up from the side of the road, “was the Johnsons’ garbage can.” The farmer set the brown can on the road.

  The 44 painted on the can did look like the numbers on Mackie’s old jersey, but it was still clearly a garbage can.

  Omar turned to Rosie. “I swear I thought . . . am I going totally crazy?” he asked in a voice no louder than a whisper.

  She put her arm around his shoulders. “No, Omar, no.”

  “You okay to get home, Omar?” the waitress asked as the crowd dispersed. Rosie eyed Omar’s car. “I’ll drive him.”

  She walked with Omar to the idling car at the side of the road. He lumbered around to the passenger side. Once they were in the privacy of his car, Rosie turned to him. “What were you doing driving?”

  “My prescription. The doctor made me a new one that isn’t as likely to lead to hallucinations.” He pulled the orange plastic vial from his pocket. “I just picked it up.”

  His chest heaved, but his voice was controlled. “I thought, well, when we drove the other day I felt all right. And since it’s only a mile to the pharmacy I thought I would try to do it myself, and then . . . ” he motioned to the garbage can. “It just looked like him,” he said meekly and looked down at his hands. “The whole town saw me,” he said. “They all think I’m nuts.”

  “They don’t think that, Omar,” she said, pulling from the shoulder onto Zumbay Road. At least the doctor is aware of Omar’s hallucinations, Rosie thought. Now maybe with the new medicine Omar will stop seeing and hearing things. And maybe without Omar on edge things will calm down for me too. Her lack of sleep the night before and Omar’s panic had probably made her think she had heard the hissing voice too.

  But Omar’s behavior was getting worse. He really did think he was seeing Mackie. He even made a deal with him to meet him at the graveyard.

  Chapter 11

  For the rest of the day Rosie paced, wondering if Omar was all right, hoping the hallucinations would stop, and hoping he would go to bed and stay there.

  But what if he did go to the graveyard? Was it really Jack who was behind all of this?

  Jack. It had to be him. That was the only reasonable explanation, wasn’t it? Maybe he had always been jealous of Omar. Or maybe he wasn’t before, but Mackie’s death had pushed him over the edge. Everything fell apart for Jack; he lost his brother and, on top of that, the death broke up the friendship of boys who were practically triplets separated at birth.

  Rosie opened her computer browser and searched for the Mackie Blackwell fundraiser. The happy eyes of Mackie Blackwell stared back at her. In his hand he clutched the worn football—the three names, Mackie Blackwell, Jack Blackwell, and Omar Arglos, were just visible under his fingers. The same football that they buried with Mackie.

  There were other photos. The three boys playing in the sprinkler with an orange foam football when they were probably in kindergarten. The three boys building a snowman—the snowman, of course, clutching a football. And then birthdays, junior high games, and prom pictures. Jack was in all of the shots alongside his two best friends. No, it didn’t seem like he was jealous of Omar and Mackie. It really did appear that the
y were three of a kind.

  Just after six Rosie picked up her phone. Should she call Mrs. Arglos and make sure Omar was okay? Rosie had hoped that he would get some sleep and then text her. Maybe she just needed to be patient. The last thing she wanted to do was wake Omar up if he was finally sleeping.

  At eight she checked her phone again. Still no texts from Omar. Finally at eleven she texted him.

  ROSIE: Hey, how are you doing?

  No response.

  The trauma and the medication. Could there be any other explanation for Omar’s bizarre behavior? And why wasn’t Jack dropping the story of Omar harassing him with texts? Messages that were sent from Mackie as if Mackie really had come back. She thought of the hissing voice telling her to “help him” and shivered.

  What if Omar was still planning to meet Mackie tonight? If that was the case, she couldn’t let Omar go alone. She looked at the time on her phone. It was eleven thirty. If she left now she would be able to stop whatever was going to happen at the graveyard at midnight. But she would have to hurry. Rosie grabbed a flashlight and slipped out the front door, slowly pulling it closed until it clicked.

  The moon shone from a black sky as she hurried down Zumbay Road. A rolling fog filled the ditches and partially covered the road. Rosie looked back, but even the lights at Dina’s Diner were off. There was no one else around; no one to help her if she found something horrible at the graveyard. She walked a little faster.

  Ten minutes later she stepped onto the damp grass of the graveyard. Ahead, back near the forest of dark trees that grew behind the church, a shadowy figure stood in front of a small yellow light. He was there, at Mackie’s grave.

  “Oma—” she started but then stopped. No, she wouldn’t call out to Omar and let him know she was there. Instead she hurried to the far right, into the trees. Rosie would sneak up on him and see what was really going on.

  Her feet crunched on the dry leaves as she slowly made her way in the blue moonlight through the thick trees. The mist dissolved and Omar came into focus as she crept closer. He stood at the tombstone, holding a single candle. On the tomb was a familiar red chalice. Omar lifted it, as if to drink.