The Moth-Winged Hour

It was the autumn of 1998, and the old St. Agatha’s Sanatorium on the bluffs of Maine had been closed for a decade. My friend Caleb had a cousin who swore he’d snuck in through the tunnel from the old carriage house, and that’s what we planned to do on the night before Halloween. There were seven of us: me, Caleb, Maya, Theo, Priya, Jonah, and Lena. We were all nineteen, bored, and convinced that fear was just a cheap thrill.

We parked at a derelict gas station a mile away and hiked through the woods, flashlights off until we reached the rusted fence. The tunnel entrance was half-hidden under brambles. Jonah, who’d been there before, led us through a low concrete passage that smelled of damp earth and decay. It was pitch black, and the only sound was our shuffling feet and the drip of water somewhere ahead. When we emerged into the sanatorium’s basement, the air was cold and still, like a held breath.

We found the main staircase, its banisters coated in dust. The floorboards groaned under our weight. We were heading to the old chapel on the third floor, where Caleb’s cousin said the ghost of a nun was seen. As we climbed, the smell of mothballs grew stronger, and something else—something sharp, like burnt sugar. At the top of the stairs, the corridor stretched before us with doors on either side. One door was ajar, leading to what must have been the chapel. We entered to find a vast room with shattered stained-glass windows. The moon cast faint colored patterns on the floor. There was an altar, and behind it, a massive mural of saints, their eyes seemed to follow us.

We stood in the center, waiting for something to happen. Then Lena whispered, ‘Do you hear that?’ We all went silent. It was a faint fluttering sound, like hundreds of wings. It seemed to come from the walls. The sound grew louder, and then a moth flew out from behind the altar. Then another, and another, until a cloud of them was swirling around us. They weren’t ordinary moths; they were pale gray, almost translucent, with a faint, sickly glow. They began to land on our hands, our faces. We brushed them off, but there were too many. The fluttering was deafening.

Panic set in. We ran for the door, but it slammed shut. The moths’ glow intensified, revealing that the mural behind the altar was changing. The saints’ faces were twisting into something demonic, their eyes bleeding black. The air grew heavy, and we couldn’t breathe. The moths started to converge on the mural, forming a silhouette of a tall, gaunt figure with wings. It stepped out of the wall, and the moths dispersed, revealing a woman made entirely of moth wings. Her eyes were void, and she spoke in a voice like rustling silk: ‘You have come to be my children.’

We screamed and clawed at the door. Jonah broke a window with a loose stone, and we tumbled out onto the roof. Behind us, the woman with moth wings grew larger, blocking the broken window. We scrambled down the fire escape, but the moths were everywhere, stinging us, driving us toward the edge. At the bottom, we found the basement door locked. We had to go back through the tunnel. The tunnel was now swarming with moths, but we ran through, and they parted just enough for us to pass.

We emerged into the cold night air, gasping. We didn’t stop running until we reached the car. As we drove away, we saw that the entire sanatorium was covered in a thick, moving blanket of moths. But we were safe. Or so we thought.

Now, years later, we’ve all started to change. We’ve developed a craving for sweets, for sugar. We find ourselves waking up with fine gray powder on our pillows, like dust from wings. And occasionally, when we catch our reflection, we see a shadow behind us, with large wings that disappear when we turn. But the worst is when we sleep. We dream of a woman who calls us her children, and we can’t wake up until the moth-winged hour. That’s when the moths come to feed. And we let them.