The Clock in the Hall

Three years ago, I moved from the coastal town of Bexhill to a small, inland city called Harlow, and I am almost certain that my flat is haunted. Many strange things have happened here, but I will only describe one.

It was a sweltering July evening, two years into my tenancy. My parents were out at a community theatre production, and I was alone in the living room, idly scrolling through my phone. I have two cats, Marmalade and Ash, and they were acting bizarrely. Ash kept pacing along the windowsill, his tail puffed up, while Marmalade flattened herself under the sofa, her eyes gleaming in the dim light. The air in the flat had turned abruptly cold, despite the heat outside. The thermostat said 28 degrees Celsius, but I was shivering.

From the hallway came a thunderous crack, like a branch snapping in a storm, followed by a crash of shattering glass. My blood froze. My heart hammered against my ribs. I wanted to run, but my legs felt like lead. After what seemed like an eternity, I forced myself to rise and creep toward the sound.

The hallway led to a small vestibule where we kept an antique grandfather clock that had belonged to my great-grandmother. The clock had stopped working years ago, its pendulums frozen, but it still stood tall, a relic of a bygone era. The mirror hanging beside it lay in a hundred glittering shards on the floor. The clock’s face was cracked, and the glass over the dial was shattered. Scattered among the wreckage were the family photographs that had been arranged on a side table, their frames twisted and broken. In the centre of the debris, the clock’s long pendulum, which had been still for decades, was swaying gently, as if it had just been set in motion. And behind it, a faint, whispered sound echoed: a ticking, steady and relentless, though the clock had no power.

I stood there, my breath coming in short gasps. The cold wrapped around me like a damp shroud. The ticking grew louder, filling the hallway, drowning out my own thoughts. I tried to step forward, to inspect the damage, but my feet felt glued to the floor. Then I noticed the photographs. In one, my grandmother was smiling at her wedding. But her face was now smeared with what looked like charcoal, distorting her features into a grimace. In another, a picture of me as a child at the beach, there was an extra figure in the background—a tall, gaunt shape that I did not remember being there. It stood at the edge of the frame, its head tilted, as if looking at the camera.

A cat yowled from the living room. The sound snapped me out of my paralysis. I stumbled back, grabbed both cats, and fled to the tiny balcony, locking the door behind me. I sat there, shivering, until my parents returned hours later. When I finally told them what had happened, they dismissed it as a draft and a faulty clock. But the next day, when we cleaned up the mess, we found that the pendulum had stopped at precisely two minutes past three—the exact time of my grandmother’s death, decades ago. And in the corner of the shattered mirror, etched into the glass as if by a diamond, were the words: ‘You will remember.’

Since that night, the clock in the hall ticks at odd hours, always stopping at the same time. And I have begun to see her reflection in the blank screen of my phone, in the gleam of a window, just for a moment. She is always standing in that hallway, her head tilted, waiting for me to forget. But I never will.