I learned quickly that the nights were the hardest.

  The first time I saw it I didn't know what I was looking at.

  I had gotten up for water — this was maybe three weeks after I moved back in, late October, during a night that is just cold enough to make sleep shallow. I walked out of my room and the hallway was dark except for the thin light coming from under the bathroom door at the far end. I assumed she was already in there and turned to go back to my room.

  That's when I saw her.

  ***

  The following is an excerpt from The Dark I Grew Up In (2018), a memoir by horror author R. Berlin. Chapter Four: "The Woman Who Taught Me Everything, Including This."

  ***

  I want to say something about her before I say this, because context matters and because she deserves it.

  My grandmother was not a frightened woman. In forty years of teaching at the same elementary school, she sent more children into the world than she could count, and she remembered most of them. Not their grades. Not their performance. Them. The specific weight of them, the particular sadness or joy they carried into her classroom every morning. She had a voice she saved for certain kids, she once told me. She used it more than she would have liked.

  She retired at sixty-eight and filled the years after with her garden, her books, her complicated opinions about television, and a grandfather clock in the hallway that had belonged to her own mother and that she wound every Sunday without fail. She was sharp and warm and occasionally terrifying in the way that only truly good people can be terrifying. She was the first person who told me that horror, real horror, was never about the monster.

  It was about the person standing in the dark trying to understand what they were looking at.

  I am telling you this so that when I tell you what happened at the end, you understand what was lost.

  And what was taken.

  ***

  The Alzheimer's came slowly. Then faster than anyone was prepared for. First it was small things. Keys. Names. The word for something she was pointing at. Then it was larger things, the chronology of her own life shuffling itself into a different order, decades bleeding into each other. By the time I moved back to be closer to her, she was living in a house that had become, for her, several houses at once: the one she grew up in, the one she raised my mother in, the one she was actually standing in, all of them overlapping in ways only she could see.

  Nights were the hardest.

  The first time I saw it I didn't know what I was looking at.

  She was standing at the entrance to the hallway, her back to me, perfectly still. She was wearing her house clothes — the pale duster she always slept in — and her hair was down, which I wasn't used to, and the dim light from the bathroom outlined her in a way that made her look ghastly. She was just standing there, one hand on the doorframe, head tilted very slightly forward, looking at something in the hallway I couldn't see.

  I said her name.

  She didn't move.

  I said it again, louder, and took a step toward her, and that's when the grandfather clock rang. Midnight. Each toll filling the hallway the way that clock had always filled the hallway, deep and resonant, the sound of it something I had grown up with and never found frightening until that moment. Until I was standing in the dark watching my grandmother's silhouette at the mouth of the hallway with her head tilted and her hand on the doorframe and the clock counting out the hour around her.

  She turned before it finished ringing. Not quickly. Slowly. And her face —

  Her face was the face of someone in the presence of something I was not in the presence of.

  She looked at me and through me and somewhere past both of us, and then something shifted, and she was back, and she blinked, and she said my name in the voice of a person waking up.

  "I need the bathroom," she said.

  I walked her down the hallway. She kept her eyes on the bathroom door the entire time. In the morning she remembered none of it.

  But I did.

  ***

  I watched her more closely after that. Differently than before. With the part of the brain that catalogs and compares.

  And there was repetition. There was a great deal of it.

  She called it the bad hour. Not a bad hour — the bad hour, singular, as if there were only one and it kept returning. Some evenings she was fine well past midnight, clear and present and almost entirely herself, talking to me at the kitchen table about her students or her garden or whatever novel she was technically in the middle of reading. Other evenings the bad hour came early, while the sun was still going down, and something would shift in her face like a door closing behind her eyes, and she would become someone who was not quite my grandmother anymore.

  Someone a little further back.

  A little more afraid.

  On those evenings, she would not walk the hallway alone.

  I didn't understand the photographs at first. The hallway was short. Well-lit. The same hallway it had always been, with the photographs lining both walls, an accumulation that happens in any home where a person has lived long and loved many. Her late husband. My mother as a child. Former students whose faces she had committed to memory and refused to let go of. The grandfather clock at the far end, tall and dark-wooded, that she had wound every Sunday for thirty years.

  She would stand at the entrance and look down the hallway and then look at me and say: not yet.

  I learned not to ask what she was waiting for. I would just take her hand and we would wait together, and after a while she would say alright, and we would walk. Quickly. She never looked at the photographs when we did. Eyes forward, fixed on the bathroom door, moving like someone passing something she had already decided not to see.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I noticed something else over the weeks of watching.

  The clock.

  It wasn't that she was afraid of the clock ringing. It was that whenever she looked at the photographs, on the evenings of the bad hour, when her eyes strayed to the frames despite herself, the clock rang. Not before. Not after. She would look, and the clock would ring, and then whatever came after the clock would come. I know how that sounds. I know the rational architecture of it: an old woman with a deteriorating mind, a clock that rang on the hour, proximity and coincidence constructing a pattern that wasn't really there.

  I watched for two years.

  It was always the clock. Always, without exception, the clock rang when she looked. Not at the hour. Not at the half hour. When she looked.

  I tested it the way a person tests something they don't want to be true. I watched her on evenings when she was clear and fine and she moved through the hallway easily, touching the frames with the tips of her fingers, pausing at her husband's photograph the way she always had. The clock did not ring. I watched her on evenings when the bad hour had her, when her eyes caught a frame despite herself, despite me, and every time, every single time.

  The clock.

  I never found the mechanism.

  ***

  The first time I actually asked her about it she was having a good evening, a Tuesday afternoon in late October when she was almost entirely herself and we were sitting in the garden watching the light do what October light does.

  She was quiet for a long time after I asked. Looking at her hands.

  "They're still there," she finally said.

  "The people. They're still in the pictures. But they don't have faces anymore," she paused. "Their eyes go white. And their skin—"

  She turned her hand over in her lap, looked at it, as if looking for the right way to describe it.

  "Their skin is like something smeared. Like someone tried to erase them but didn't finish. It's all flat. You can still tell it's them. That's the worst part. You can still tell."

  I asked her when it started.

  "It was always November," she said. "I think it was always November."

  I asked her what she thought it was.

  She looked at the garden for a long time before she answered.

  "I had a student," she said. "A long time ago. Jensen."

  ***

  She told me about Jensen with the same precision she applied to everything that mattered. Carefully. A boy in her class. A semestral break activity. A paper filled front and back with small handwriting about a monster called November that ate memories.

  "Only the happy ones," she said. "He was very — he was specific about that. The sad ones stay. The angry ones."

  She paused.

  "November can't lift those. Too heavy. It only takes the light things."

  I asked her if she'd believed him.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  "I believed that he believed it," she said. "I thought it was grief. I thought... a child described grief. Trauma."

  She looked at her hands.

  "I think about that now. What he said about what stays." She stopped. Started again. "When the clock rings and I see what I see — what's gone is the warmth. What's left is just the shape."

  She looked back at the garden.

  "Jensen would have had a name for that," she said.

  ***

  I want to be thorough here about what I claim and what I don't.

  I want to especially be thorough before I tell you about the night of the hallway.

  She had been having a bad week. Several evenings in a row of the bad hour coming early, coming heavy, her distress cycling through moods I was not always equipped to navigate. The fear. The confusion. Underneath those, pushing through them sometimes like something that had been waiting, an anger that didn't belong to the grandmother I knew. Sharp and sudden and aimed at everything, including me. Her doctors had a word for it. The word did not make it easier to be in the room with.

  I had learned by then to be gentle, to redirect, to not argue with where she was even when where she was had no overlap with where I was. I had learned patience the hard way, which is the only way, when the alternative was something I couldn't afford.

  That night I was tired. That is not an excuse. It is context.

  It was past midnight and she needed the bathroom and I came to her room to walk her down the hallway the way I always did. She was already standing at the doorframe, already doing the waiting, and I was tired and I put my hand on her back to guide her forward and I said come on, I've got you and I moved her into the hallway before she said not yet.

  I know. I know.

  She turned her head. Reflex, maybe, or maybe the body's refusal to be moved before it was ready. Her head turned and her eyes went to the photographs and the clock rang. Not on the hour. Not on any hour I could account for. The clock rang and I watched her face change.

  It did not change like fear. It changed like witness. Like a face receiving information the rest of the body hadn't caught up to yet.

  Her eyes went very wide. She made a sound that was not a word and not a scream. Something else. Something prior to both. Something that came from further back in the body than language lives. Her hand came up and she pressed it flat against the wall beside the nearest photograph, against the wall and not the photograph, like she was trying to push away from it without looking away, like looking away had become impossible.

  "Their faces," she said. "Their faces, their faces—"

  And then she was not my grandmother anymore.

  She was someone I did not know, in a hallway that was not, for her, the hallway I was standing in. She screamed. Not the word, a real scream, something that takes the whole body.

  And she hit me.

  Not gently. She was seventy-nine years old and small and she hit me with everything she had, both hands, on my chest and my arms and once on the side of my face, screaming things I could not fully parse because they were not addressed to me. She was not hitting me. She was hitting something in a hallway I couldn't see, with faces she couldn't look away from, and I was just the thing her hands found.

  I held her. That's all you can do. I got my arms around her from behind and I held her and I said her name and I said I'm here, I'm here, I'm here and she screamed and fought and wept with a grief so total it didn't seem like it could fit inside a person, and the clock.

  The clock kept ringing.

  Past any count of midnight. Past any hour. It rang and rang and I held my grandmother in the dark hallway while she stared at the photographs with white-eyed people in them and I did not look at the photographs. I did not look.

  Eventually she came back. They always come back, and it is always devastating that they do, because coming back means knowing, on some level, where they just were.

  She was limp in my arms and breathing hard and she turned her face into my shoulder like a child.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

  "You don't have to be sorry," I said.

  "I saw them," she said. "I always see them."

  I didn't ask her what she saw. I already knew.

  I walked her to the bathroom. I walked her back. I covered her photographs with dish towels that night, every one of them, and she slept better than she had in weeks.

  In the morning she didn't remember any of it.

  I did.

  ***

  I have written eleven novels. Four of them were about memory. Two were about grief. One was about a house that ate the people inside it slowly, starting with the things they loved most.

  People ask me where I get my ideas and I tell them different things depending on who's asking. Sometimes I say I don't know. Sometimes I say from everywhere. Sometimes, when the person asking seems like they can hold it, I say from the things I couldn't explain.

  My grandmother died in February, which I was grateful for. She didn't have to go in November.

  Though I have thought about it since. Whether that mattered. Whether the month mattered. Whether whatever had been coming for her for two years, ringing its cue on the grandfather clock, moving through the photographs on the wall and taking the warmth from the faces and leaving only the shape, the outline, the white eyes and the smeared skin. Whether it kept a calendar.

  Jensen would have known.

  I never found him. I looked, with only a name and a rough decade and not much else to go on. One of my grandmother's students. A boy who came home to an empty kind of house and worked out, alone, that something was eating the light out of his life and leaving the dark things behind. The ones too heavy to carry away.

  I'd like to think he made enough happy memories to slow it down. That somewhere, November got full.

  But I write horror for a living, which means I know how these things tend to go.

  I know what the clock sounds like when it rings.