The clock was always the first thing everybody saw when they walked into the house. It was a huge clock, black arms almost twice the size of mine ticked loudly across its face. The only thing unique about this clock was its size; it covered most of the wall it hung on. The face of the clock had turned yellow with age; the numbers dulled a light shade of gray. Most people say the clock is a thing of wonder when they see it, but I didn’t like the clock, I thought it was a curse.


My mother had bought the damned thing when I was only nine years old, and I thought right away that there wasn’t something quite right about it. You could hear it ticking all the way from the second floor, right through the walls. My father had run off when I was about three years old so he didn’t really have that much to say about the clock. Then my mom died right in front of the thing when I was eleven, they said she suffered from a mild heart attack. That sounded odd to me, given the fact that my mother was on the right side of thirty and never did anything that would been even remotely bad to her health, she didn't even want to go to amusement parks because she said that the rides were to dangerous. The doctors couldn’t really explain it to me either; they said it was a freak occurrence and that it does sometimes happen. I didn’t believe them though, something had done this to my mom and I had a vague idea of what did it.


I’m sixteen now and am living with my grandma a few blocks away from the old house. She never really talks that much anymore, most of the time she just cleans everything, shuffling around the house with some kind of cleaning device. I usually helped her; she was sixty years old and couldn’t do a lot of things by herself.


Today I had bigger fish to fry, I walked into the garage and grabbed my grandpas old sledgehammer and started out the back door. The hammer wasn’t that heavy, I had been working at a construction site all summer and I wasn’t the skinny little weakling that I used to be. I walked up to the front door of my house and kicked the door in, breaking the crappy lock our landlord had put there for burglars.


Everything started to move really slowly, I could feel my heart beating through my chest. The clock just ticked away, but the ticks sounded as if I were banging on the floor with my sledgehammer. I started walking towards the clock; the whole room seemed to be tipped on its side, making me stumble to the left, knocking over the small table next to a lazy-boy. Each step became a chore, sweat started to dribble down my face, and my legs wobbled, ready to give out any given moment.


I was right in front of the clock now, dizzy and disoriented more than I ever had been. My shirt was drenched in sweat; breathing fast and heavy escaped my aching lungs. I raised my sledge hammer, grunting from the now difficult task of what would have been an easy just minutes ago. The ticking became loud and heavier than before, I couldn’t move my arm, it seemed to be frozen. The whole room had stopped, a fly next to me was frozen in mid flight, and so was a drop of sweat that had only made it halfway to the floor. I tried to move my fingers and they surprisingly did, and If I could move my fingers, I knew that I could break that damned clock into pieces.


The hammer seemed to rise by itself, and when I brought it down, all hell seemed to unleash in my house. The hammer hit the center of the clock, smashing it into three pieces. There was a loud suction noise and all the things in the room went towards the remains of the clock. Then all at once there was a blinding light that blinded me, and I was shot straight out of the window of my house, rolling across the street.


Pain was the only thing I could feel now, and my vision had begun to blacken and become hazy. My house was destroyed; the entire house and all of the things within the house were falling around me. I had to roll out of the way when a small table nearly landed right on top of me. I started to crawl towards the house next door, tears welling up in my eyes. Once I was on the neighbor’s lawn I stopped crawling and just laid there, waiting for someone to come.


Then I heard a sound I thought I had gotten rid of, the loud, low ticking reached my ears. I looked up and I knew I was seeing things, there was no way that clock was hanging in the air right in front of me. A large kitchen knife flew down and landed square in the middle of my back, going so fast and picking up so much force from it’s long fall, it went straight through me all the way into the ground, pinning me to it. I tried to cry out but my voice wouldn’t work. My vision gave out and I laid my head down on the grass, and the last thing I heard was that loud, low ticking of that giant clock.





Tick Tock


Tick Tock


Tick Tock….