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.