The Clock that Counted Backwards

The first time I saw it, I felt a queer pull, like the clock was a lodestone and I was a scrap of iron. It was buried in a cardboard box in the attic of our sprawling Victorian house—the oldest in Mercer, a town that clung to the banks of the Waikato River like a stubborn barnacle. The house creaked and sighed with every gust, and the attic smelled of mothballs and dust, but the clock was pristine, as if it had been waiting, holding its breath for nine years.

My father lifted it out, the brass face catching a shaft of light from the dormer window. ‘This was your great-grandmother’s,’ he said, a note of reverence in his voice. ‘Your nana’s. She was just like you, you know. Same laugh, same stubborn streak, same way of tilting her head when she was thinking.’ I barely heard him. My attention was snared by the clock’s intricate face, not a standard dial but a swirling, hypnotic pattern of gold and silver spirals, with a small, glass-encased compartment at the bottom. Inside that compartment, a tiny, ornate key, no bigger than my thumb, rested on a bed of faded velvet.

I knew I shouldn’t take it—it belonged in the attic, a relic of a woman I never knew—but I did. I smuggled it to my room, hung it on the wall above my desk, and slid a fresh battery into the hidden compartment on the back. The clock hadn’t ticked in decades, but now it hummed to life, the second hand beginning its sweep. Except it was going backwards. The hands moved counterclockwise, and the weight of the key seemed to lift, as if the clock was winding itself down, not up. I should have been unsettled, but I was fascinated.

That was in early October. The days grew shorter, the leaves on the oaks lining our street turned a bruised gold, and the first frost nipped at the windows. Every night, I lay in bed and watched the clock’s hands glide backwards, and I began to notice small changes. My jacket in the closet seemed a size too big, though I’d worn it the day before. A photograph on my dresser showed my dog Bruno, but he’d been dead for two years. And the sound of my mother’s voice when she called me for dinner—it was younger, higher, tinged with a sorrow I didn’t recognize.

One evening, huddled over my algebra homework, I heard a faint hum from the clock. Its face was dimly lit, and the spirals seemed to move, like a maelstrom pulling everything inward. The key in the glass compartment was vibrating, and I saw it begin to turn on its own, counterclockwise. As it turned, the room grew cold, and a smell I couldn’t place—lavender and old paper—filled the air. I reached out to touch the glass, and my reflection in the pane didn’t match my movement. It lagged, as if a ghost was mirroring me.

I told my father about the clock, hoping he’d laugh it off, but his face went pale. ‘Your nana was the same,’ he whispered. ‘She always said that clock was her mother’s, and it carried the sorrows of their family. She said it was counting her down.’ He wouldn’t elaborate, but that night I found a small, leather-bound journal in the attic, her journal, with yellowed pages filled with spidery handwriting. The last entry, dated October 15, 1995, read: ‘The clock knows. It’s unwound me. I’ll be with them soon.’

October 30th. I woke with a start. The digital alarm on my phone read 00:00, but the clock on my wall showed 11:59. And the date—my phone insisted it was November 1st, but the clock’s tiny calendar (a feature I’d somehow missed) said October 1st. I looked in the mirror and saw a girl I didn’t recognize—younger, with rounder cheeks, a missing tooth. A scar on my forearm from a bike accident had vanished. I stumbled to my parents’ room, but the door was locked, and a stranger’s voice told me to go back to bed.

I ran to the kitchen. The house was not my house. The wallpaper was different, the appliances were old-fashioned, and on the counter sat a photo of a young couple I’d never seen. A woman with eyes just like mine stared back. I looked at the clock on the wall—a different one, normal, ticking forward—and then I heard my name. Not my name. A name from a photo I’d once seen: ‘Abigail.’

I screamed, but no sound came out. I was inside a memory, or maybe a curse. The key in the clock—I realized it wasn’t a key at all. It was a razor, a tiny, cruel blade, hidden in that velvet-lined niche. And the clock wasn’t counting down. It was unwinding me, stripping away the years until I was nothing, or someone else.

I forced myself back to my room. The clock’s hands were spinning backwards, faster now, a blur. I tore it from the wall, fumbled for the battery, and yanked it out. The ticking stopped. The room stopped. But when I looked at the mirror, I saw the old woman—my great-grandmother, I knew—staring back with hollow, accusing eyes. Her lips moved, and I heard, not with my ears but in my mind: ‘You can’t stop it. I started it a century ago, and it’s my turn to rest.’

I ran. I threw the clock into the river, watched it sink beneath the black water. But when I turned around, the house was gone, replaced by an empty field, and I was a seven-year-old girl, lost and crying, clutching a key that wasn’t a razor—just a key. The clock was gone, but I was back at the beginning. And the date on a faded newspaper stuck to a fence post read: October 15, 1995.

They found me wandering on the riverbank, a girl with no memory of who I was, only a name that wasn’t mine. My parents—my father and mother—cried with relief, but I looked at them as strangers. The only thing familiar was the attic, and in it, a box with a clock, waiting. I hung it on my wall again, because some things you can’t outrun. And every October, when the key turns on its own, I know I’m unwinding another year, closer to the moment she died, and the moment I was born—and I pray that this time, I’ll find a different ending.