The Murdering Hour
by Charlie Kondek
She complained, “First of all, don’t call me mother. Second, it’s too early for this. Third, you’ll get paid when I get paid.”
Lucy couldn’t fall back asleep now, not with that feeling like they were all on the bed with her, so she cast the quilt aside and set her feet in socks on the cold wooden floor. Stepping tenderly and slowly on legs like uncurled pipe cleaners, she made her way to the kitchen in the empty house permeated by rainy morning light though it was not raining. The spirits moved alongside her, underfoot, and congregated expectantly in a corner while she made coffee.
“We want a child,” said the voice like a hysterical old lady. “We want a pregnant woman!” said another, one of the hissers.
With the coffee beginning to burble, Lucy went in search of the toilet and her toothbrush, reminding her audience, “You’ll get what I can deliver. Unless you want to see me in prison. Which would put an end to our fun and games.”
The house was lovely, and offended her. It was a classically Detroit, red brick four-square in the Woodbridge neighborhood with one of those wide, inviting porches and a tidy lawn touched by the first falling leaves. Unlike many of its neighbors, it had been beautifully restored, each brick and shingle, and its interior was just as delightful: refinished floors, an inspired mix of vintage and modern furnishings, iron and brass art on walls a subtle shade of mustard gold with brown trim. Lucy couldn’t decide which annoyed her more, her envy of the excellent restoration or the fact that it had been accomplished by the wealth of the older couple that now sat across from her at the Chippendale dining table in the side room. “We bought it for our daughter and her husband when they got married,” said Dan Webling, the tall man with the gray hair expensively cut. “Not just a gift but an investment. Something we could flip if they ever wanted to live somewhere else. Like when they have kids.”
“We didn’t know it was haunted,” said Lydia Webling, similarly coifed, also in her 60s and made thin, tan and young-looking by a regimen of affluence. “Nothing like this happened when the workers were here. But after Hailey and Jeremy moved in… well, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A statue leaped off the mantle and crushed our friend’s foot. I’m genuinely scared. By the way, do you have to smoke?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, glaring through a tendril that rose from a Benson & Hedges. Honestly, she detested these people, and would be glad to take their money. She tried to remember how they acquired it. Something about a string of dermatology clinics. “As unpleasant as it is,” she explained, “the smoke tells them I’m here. And will tell us when they are here.” She left out that it was part of the theater as she took a drag and exhaled it in Lydia’s direction.
“We brought cash like you said,” said Dan Webling, putting a manila envelope on the table. “I have to tell you, I’m really uncomfortable turning all of this over until we’re certain of the results. Will you take five now, the rest when… when it stops? When we’re sure it’s stopped?”
Lucy shook her head, hair untidy and as black as her clothes. “That won’t work. After a few weeks, you’ll start to doubt whether any of this was real, and you’ll have doubts about paying my fee.”
“My friend’s medical bills are real,” said Lydia.
“No doubt. I’m afraid my terms are inflexible.”
“Well, how about documentation?” Dan asked. “Like, can we get a receipt?”
Lucy shrugged. “I’m not opposed. I run a legitimate business as a medium and I can always use the referral. A payment of this size gets difficult to explain on tax forms. Why don’t I email you my standard…”
This was a good time to have the smoke from her cigarette curl into a tiny vortex, cold air whispering along the floor as if a freezer drawer had been opened. She had taught the spirits that, the timing of improvisation. It set up her next line wonderfully. “They’re here.”
Lydia moved closer to her husband, half out of his chair, as the walls and floor creaked and a low murmur of foreign words and moans seemed to pass through them. Lucy stood up, dropping the cigarette on the floor and partially crushing it under her boot. She gazed at the ceiling. “I’ll start upstairs,” she announced. “Stay close to me.”
On the stairs, picture frames leaped from the walls and were smashed so suddenly it made Lydia yelp and cling to Dan, who was right on Lucy’s heels as animal groaning grew louder and she examined the upper rooms—stylish, of course, the bathroom meticulously tiled and glazed, original sink and tub, seafoam and serene. She caught a glimpse of her own grimacing face in the mirror. It cracked, drawing angry lines across her eyes and cheeks. Books fell from shelves; one lay on the floor having its pages riffled by invisible hands. The spirits worked their keening into a wind-like roar, and as duvets were yanked from beds and a lamp was turned over, Lucy shouted.
“Be gone from here, foul spirits! Malevolent forces, disperse! By my power, I command you, leave this place!”
Lucy raised her hands and plunged into the room, moving about as if pushing the spirits and their noise and cold wind before her. “Hell hasten you! Fly, wings of Baphomet! Gnash, teeth of Molech! Choir of Asmodeus, gather and go!”
She continued this nonsense as she paraded around the rooms, into the hall, and down the stairs, broken glass under her boots ground into the carpet. The vortex of smoke on the ground floor had grown large enough to fill the side room, and as she stepped into it, it seemed to flee from her. Dan and Lydia cowered on the stairs. Suddenly, Lydia’s body jerked as if shoved, and the expression on her face changed from one of terror to that of seething rage. She unleashed a string of obscenities on her husband in an inhuman voice. Lucy knew the spirits could sometimes do this, but she didn’t think it necessary in this case; probably, they were just showing off. Dan quacked, “Lydia, what’s wrong?!” and in reply she raked her nails across his face before Lucy could shout, “Come out of her, fiends!” Lydia crumpled on the stairs like a bean bag chair.
Once more, Lucy declared, “Leave this place!” The voices that had begun as songs of agony now shrieked in alarm, and they, and the smoke, gathered into a column under Lucy’s conducting gestures, leapt to the ceiling, then dove into the fireplace and up the chimney. Gone, leaving silence behind.
Lucy turned to see the Weblings on the stairs, Lydia supported by her husband’s astonished embrace. “Still want that receipt?”
Lucy thought having piles of cash like the one now in the trunk of her car would take the sting out of her life’s disappointments. Sitting in one of the precious restaurants that had surfaced on the tide of migration—some would say gentrification—back into Detroit, she felt again the bitterness money had failed to remove. She lingered over coffee and amaretto wishing you could still smoke indoors, and watched with distaste the restaurant’s other patrons, carefully assembled hipsters whose every stitch, body part and gesture fit the setting while she and her dull, choppy hair and drab clothes hailed from 1992. None of what they had had ever come to her. Her career in non-profits had gone nowhere, because she’d never been cool enough to be favored by those wealthy board members she had to work with. Her marriage failed, like all her relationships, because, she now believed, there was something grotesque about her that made her unfit for companionship. And so she had never become a mother, never been able to heal through a child of her own the wounds inflicted on her by her parents and their impossible standards, the nature of a love that depended on the right appearance, the good grades, the social successes, unattained. She sipped coffee and watched a couple at another table with two young kids—who brings kids to a chic place like this, except to pose? She hated them all. She was happy to have partnered with the spirits to suck money out of this blossoming, new Detroit from which she was excluded. Except she wasn’t. Happy.
Lucy lit a cigarette as she walked to her Subaru. She could sense the spirits in the parking lot with her, in the echoes of her footsteps. Climbing behind the wheel, the headlights stabbing the ground floor of an office building, she remembered how she’d summoned them—“invited” was a better word—how she’d sought them in ancient books and under the tutelage of other practitioners, in a lot of inconclusive experiments. There wasn’t a formula, really, you just tried a lot of things until something happened, but it amounted to lighting a fire on the shore of a lonely lake and beckoning until something beached there. Now they were with her, and now that she had been paid, they had to be paid.
Lucy piloted the car away from the tourist areas, the nightlife districts, to where no university students lived, no relocated suburbanites. It was still easy to get away from Detroit’s safe places into more desperate neighborhoods, some occupied, some not, some occupied that shouldn’t have been. Plentiful, too, were the derelict old industrial hulks, palaces of unused concrete, steel and broken glass that could hide lots of things. Lucy realized the truth of what she’d said in the kitchen that morning. Late as it was, it was not quite the murdering hour. She would have liked to wait in one of the city’s celebrated bars drinking and despising, but she needed all her faculties, so she parked in the shadows of a ruined church and killed time killing butts, urging the spirits to be patient.
Three o’clock in the morning. A slumbering shape in a nest of blankets, coats and plastic bags lay under the lip of an uncompleted overpass. Lucy had done this before and it was always the easiest way to satisfy the blood debt; kill a homeless person, or someone stoned and sleeping out of doors, isolated from witnesses. She stepped carefully up the concrete slope to where her victim lay. She had one of those chisel-shaped Japanese daggers in its sheath in her coat, and she knew where on the neck to slice someone so they’d bleed out; the spirits loved that. Hovering over the prone figure, she studied it to see where its features might be. Gently she pulled at the edge of some covering, and thought she could tell it was a woman. Peeling further, something else in the pile stirred—another body part? Oh, great, Lucy thought, a dog. But then came a small voice from the corner of the refuse, “Mama?” and Lucy nearly leapt from the level concrete, sheathed the knife, and half-slid down the concrete slope.
The spirits, whom she had sensed gleefully over her shoulder, now erupted. “What are you waiting for?” “It’s perfect!” “A mother AND a child? Do it!” Their outrage grew as Lucy stumbled toward the Subaru fishing for her keys. “No,” she declared. “We’ll find someone else.”
“Mother,” whined the voice that claimed to be hers, “we want this one!”
“Go back and finish the job!” wailed another.
“I said no. We’ll do it another way.”
“We’ll do it this way!”
The voice that said this was one she had not heard before, deeper, more authoritative somehow, and Lucy felt herself lifted under the arms. No, not lifted, something raised her arms for her, independent of her will. Frantically, she tried to remember how this was supposed to work, whether she could regain control. “Get out,” she said feebly, feeling her legs carry her a few steps without her consent, and the deep voice joined the others in laughing as her hand of its own accord drew the dagger again. She remembered a phrase from her research, “ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him,” and now she begged, “Wait, don’t do this—I’ll do anything you say!”
“It’s too late for that, mother!” Lucy’s free hand seized her hair and lifted her chin roughly. The dagger, edge backwards, was raised to her throat.
Had they done it? She was afraid to raise her fingers to her neck. Then realized she was no longer a passenger in her own body and could, in fact, touch the area. Yes, wet with blood, and she locked her gaze on where the Subaru was parked just inside an orange road closure blockade beside a rectangular section of torn-up asphalt. As if the car could save her, Lucy walked toward it, but by the time she touched the door she had grown faint, so tired, and her ability to see the curved on-ramp, the streetlights around it, and the buildings beyond was dwindling, closing, so that now all she could see was the road rising up to meet her and the night sky above her as she rolled onto her back, and then nothing, a starless sky.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. His story “The Gift” appeared previously at Mysterion. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
On his inspiration for “The Murdering Hour,” Kondek says, “I mostly write crime fiction with Christian themes, but where this allows me to stray into horror territory is by introducing supernatural elements. For this story, I was thinking about demons and demonology, and what took shape was the idea that working with demons could be a lot like working for the mob. And what happens when you double-cross the mob? For my research, I consulted, among other things, Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, and of course the many descriptions of demons in the Gospels.”
“The Murdering Hour” by Charlie Kondek. Copyright © 2026 by Charlie Kondek.
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