It was my worst fear as a child: that something lurked under my bed, waiting for me to put my feet down at night so it could grab at my legs. So much so that I made my parents remove the bed skirt around the perimeter so they could check every night before they tucked me in.

I knew it was likely some kind of brain trick, but there was no way I was getting out of bed.

I lay there for a couple more hours, trying to ignore my full bladder and contemplating whether I could finagle peeing into the glass next to my bed, until I saw the sun begin to peek through the roman shades in my bedroom and figured it was safe. The under-bed creature wouldn’t dare come out during the day.

We had read in one of the library books that demons were most powerful during the nighttime, specifically at the 3:00 a.m. hour. It was apparently a perversion of the time when Jesus died, which was 3:00 p.m.

“So is that adjusted for time zones? Like, do demons say, ‘Oh, it was three p.m. in Mesopotamia in 40 AD or whatever, which would be noon here’?” Jess said.

I shot her a look. “We have to take this seriously, or not at all.”

“Oh, ‘not at all’ is an option? Because I’d like that for five hundred, Alex,” she said.

Melissa put her hand over one of the books. “No, it’s an actual belief in religious circles. Demonic energy is most powerful at three a.m. My parents used to tell my brother and me that if we woke up during that hour, we should hold the Bible on top of us to ward off any bad energy.” Her eyes glazed over, and her mind went somewhere far away. “They believe it,” she said again with a look of disgust.

“Del told me he made a lot of bad decisions in college around that time,” Jess said as she pulled her hair into a knot on top of her head. She hadn’t received her bachelor’s, instead working on a cruise ship for a couple of years as a waitress after high school, so her college points of reference were limited to fraternity-heyday anecdotes from Del.

“Yeah, I’m sure it was the demons and not jungle juice,” I said.

Still, I made sure to step far away from the underside of my bed when I stood up the next morning.

I didn’t want to go downstairs, as one of the laws of parenting was that the kids would wake up the second I opened my bedroom door, so I shuffled over and sat down at my computer, slowly opening it. I scanned my email and opened the daily job-posting digest for social work positions.

I stopped when I came to the third one.

The posting read: