The Vanished Hour

The digital clock beside my bed read 4 a.m. I got up to shower when my wife told me it was only 2 a.m. I returned to bed. Two hours later, I awoke again and climbed from between the blankets.

It is a time when the veil between the world of waking and the world of dreams seemed thin–an hour of dislocation, where sleep clung to the edges of the consciousness like an ill-fitting coat. I could hear the wind, low and murmuring like a thing alive. Yet, there was nothing particularly unusual about the hour, where strange and inexplicable happenings sometimes disturbed the town and, in the end, were no more stranger than the winds that swept through the narrow streets at night.

Still, I lay in bed for a moment longer, staring at the dim shadows of my room, unsure if I was truly awake. The sensation passed quickly enough, and I swung my feet over the edge of my bed, feeling the cold floorboards press against the soles of my feet. My limbs were stiff, as though I had been asleep far longer than I should have been, but the feeling of disorientation was nothing new.

I padded across the room and to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, my mind still dulled by sleep’s lingering influence. The clock on the kitchen wall, a weathered, antique piece I had inherited from my late father, ticked steadily in the background. I reached for the sponge I had used the night before to clean the dishes. It lay on the sink edge, still damp but not yellow as it had been. No, now it was blue, an unnatural, unsettling shade of blue, a color I could not place. I stared at it for a long moment, trying to make sense of the shift, but my mind only floundered in the fog of confusion.

I had been sure the sponge had been yellow the night before–so sure that I had noticed how it glowed under the dim kitchen light as I had used it. But now it was pale, sickly blue, as though something had taken it, twisted it inside-out, and returned it to the sink under a different guise. I picked it up gingerly, turning it over in my hands. It felt the same, yet–not the same. The fibers were slightly stiffer, as though they had dried under unnatural conditions.

A wave of dizziness struck me, and I put the sponge down quickly. Something was wrong. I glanced at the clock again. It still read 4 a.m. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had slipped, had shifted. I couldn’t put it into words, but the certainty gnawed at me like an ache in my chest.

I walked to the front door, hoping fresh air would clear my mind. But as I opened it, I was greeted by a scene that, in its banality, was somehow more disturbing than any of the eldritch horrors that I had feared might lurk in the recesses of my thoughts.

They covered the street.

Mice. Dozens, if not hundreds, scurrying in every direction. Their small, fur-covered bodies twisted and convulsed, darting between the cracks in the boardwalk, squeezing under doorways, and even climbing the walls of nearby houses. The long-familiar frogs croaking was replaced by the sharp, skittering sound of tiny claws on stone.

I had lived through the plague of frogs–a bizarre infestation that had been almost too biblical to believe–but this was something worse. The mice were not mere pests. They were wrong. They moved with an intelligence, a feverish urgency, that sent a shiver up my spine. And their eyes–oh, God, their eyes–glowed faintly in the half-light, a sickly greenish hue that seemed to reflect something deeper, something ancient, in the void of the universe.

I stumbled back into the house, slamming the door behind me. My heart pounded in my chest. I could still hear them outside, their frantic scurrying growing louder, more intense. The wind, which had seemed to murmur before, now howled as though it were trying to speak to me, urging me to listen, to understand. But I couldn’t. I could not make sense of any of it.

I felt unmoored, adrift in a sea of half-remembered dreams and altered perceptions. The sponge, the mice, the clock pointed to something shifting beneath the surface of my reality, something I could neither comprehend nor escape.

Had I, too, shifted? Was this still my town? Was this still my life?

I turned back toward the kitchen, where the blue sponge lay on the sink. It was no longer the same.

The fabric of my existence felt altered, twisted like the sponge in my hand, changing in ways I could not fully grasp. What had happened to me? To all of us? Was this a waking dream, or had I truly crossed into a world where the laws of nature no longer apply?

Outside, the wind screamed again, and in that howl, I thought I heard something worse than the scraping of mice claws.

It was a whisper.

A voice from beyond.

And it spoke my name.