The Witching Hour.

Sophie couldn’t sleep.

The brilliant bright starlight was slanting through a gap in her skydome. It was shining right onto her makeshift pillow.

Everyone else on the ship had been asleep for hours.

Sophie closed her eyes and lay quite still. She tried very hard to doze off.

It was no good. The starlight was like a laser engraver slicing through the storage room and onto her face.

The ship was absolutely silent.There wasn’t any whir of machinery, nor any footsteps on the deck above.

The vacuum of space was all that was behind her skydome, no maintenance was being done on the shields. Cargo and passenger ships all waited in their garages for the morning. Not the tiniest sound could be heard anywhere. Sophie had never known such a silence.

Perhaps, she told herself, this is what they call the witching hour.

They witching hour, someone once told her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark thing came out of hiding and had the world to themselves.

The starlight then ever on Sophie’s pillow. She decided to get off the ground and reset the skydome.

It was not a pleasant experience for you if you were an orphan caught onboard the planetary ship. For some it was a wonderful thing and children were adopted into loving homes, however, this is not most likely the case.
But there was no one about now, Sophie was sure of that.

She reached for her visor laying beside her, it had chrome rims and very thick lenses. She could hardly see a thing without them. She put them on and reset the skydome.

How she longed to take a quick shimmy up the ladder, and take a peek at how the ship looked with the witching hour at hand!

She listened again, everything was deathly still.

The longing to look became so strong that she couldn’t resist it. Quickly she shimmied up the ladder and leaned out the entry hatch.

In the silvery moonlight, the Marketplace she knew so well looked so different. The home pods looked bent and crooked, like houses in a fairy tale. Across the rail, Mr. Rance’s shop, were you could buy robot arms and computer chips and bits of wire. It didn’t look real. There was something dim and misty about that too.

Sophie allowed her eye to travel further and further down the street.

Suddenly, she froze. There was something crawling up the street on the other side.

It was something black…

Something big and black…

Something very tall and very black and very squiggly.

Sophie's heart hammered against her ribs. She pressed herself flat against the hatch, only her eyes and the top of her head showing above the rim.

The thing came on up the middle of the empty street, swaying between the darkened shopfronts. It moved oddly, half gliding, half lurching, and every few steps it paused, as though listening for something, or sniffing the recycled air. It was enormous. Sophie guessed it stood three times the height of the tallest grown-up she had ever seen, and it was made of strange limbs that bent in more places than an elbow or a knee had any right to, and a head that swivelled on a neck like a length of cable. The starlight caught it only in slivers, glinting off something wet and dark, like the shell of a beetle, or old ship-hull plating gone black with age.

It stopped outside Mr. Rance's shop.

Sophie did not breathe.

The creature bent low, far lower than seemed possible, until its strange swivelling head was level with the shop's window. It stayed like that for a long moment, quite still, gazing in at the robot arms and the coils of wire and the little glowing chips arranged behind the glass.

Then, very slowly, it reached out one long black arm: and Sophie saw that the arm did not end in a hand at all, but in something more like a cluster of thin flexible rods, spreading and curling the way a sea anemone's tentacles might spread in water, and it laid this strange hand flat against the window. Then, it stood up straight again, and bend downwards, but in the other direction this time: Sophie's mind struggled to keep up with the physics of it all as another arm, stiffer and silver, extended down to where its feet were. It reached for a small black case that Sophie had not realised it was holding before, and it opened like a black metal flower, shelves unfurling like petals, all lined with small, colourful bottles. It picked one up with its silver arm, that now extended like a claw, and placed the amethyst bottle in a chamber attached to the black arm. And then it rose, slid its dark hand beneath the sill, and all Sophie could see was the purple powder exploding into a fine mist behind the glass, obscuring eveyrthing else in the room.

Her visor, thick-lensed as it was, began to fog faintly with her own breath. She dared not lift a hand to wipe it, for fear the smallest movement would give her away.

The creature straightened up. And now, horribly, it turned towards her, towards the huddle of garages and gantries where the cargo ships slept, toward the very hatch where Sophie crouched with only her eyes showing. And it began, unhurried, gliding on those long bent legs, to cross the street.