The Clockmaker’s Apprentice

It was the autumn of 1987 when I took a job as an archivist in the town of Merrow’s Hollow, a place that seemed to have been forgotten by time. My office was in the basement of the old Merrow & Sons Clockworks building, a sprawling brick structure that had once been the town’s pride. The upper floors were filled with intricate, half-finished clocks, their brass gears and pendulums gathering dust. I was there to organize the company’s records, but the building itself seemed to hold a different kind of history.

My first week, I noticed the clocks. Every morning, at precisely 8:00 AM, a faint ticking would start, as if a hundred tiny footsteps were walking across the walls. At first, I dismissed it as the building’s ancient plumbing or the wind. But the ticking grew louder each day, until it seemed to be coming from the very air around me. I mentioned it to my supervisor, an old man named Mr. Pemberton, who simply said, ‘The clocks know their rhythms.’ He refused to elaborate.

One evening, I stayed late to finish cataloging a stack of ledgers. Around 9 PM, the ticking stopped. The silence was so abrupt it felt like a physical blow. In the quiet, I heard a new sound: a faint, rhythmic scraping, like a key being turned in a lock, but it was coming from inside the walls. I followed the sound to a narrow door at the back of the archive room, a door I had assumed was a closet. It was locked, but the scraping came from behind it.

I retrieved a paperclip from my desk and picked the lock. The door swung open to reveal a steep, narrow staircase descending into darkness. A draft of cold air, smelling of oil and old metal, washed over me. Against my better judgment, I took a flashlight and descended. The stairs ended at another door, this one ajar. I pushed it open and found myself in a small, windowless room. In the center stood a single, tall grandfather clock, its face cracked and missing its hands. On the floor lay a tarnished pocket watch, its case engraved with the initials ‘E. M.’.

I picked up the pocket watch. As soon as I touched it, the ticking started again, but this time it was coming from the pocket watch itself. I held it to my ear. It was ticking backwards. A wave of vertigo washed over me, and I had to brace myself against the wall. When I looked up, the grandfather clock had changed. Its hands were not missing; they were frozen at 11:59, and the pendulum was swinging rapidly from side to side, as if trying to break free.

I dropped the pocket watch and ran back up the stairs, slamming the door behind me. That night, I couldn’t sleep. The ticking had returned, but now it was inside my head, a constant, relentless rhythm. The next morning, I went straight to Mr. Pemberton. He looked at me with tired eyes and said, ‘You’ve found Ethan’s room. He was the old clockmaker’s apprentice. He died in 1929, the night before the great clock was to be finished. They say he was so obsessed with making time perfect that he tried to stop it. He vanished, and the clock was never completed.’

I tried to ignore what I had seen, but the building seemed to conspire against me. Files would rearrange themselves, and every time I looked at a clock, it showed the same time: 11:59. One afternoon, I found a crumpled photograph in a ledger from 1929. It showed a young man standing next to the very grandfather clock I had seen. He was smiling, but his eyes were hollow. On the back was written, ‘Ethan Merrow, apprentice, just before the final adjustment.’

In the weeks that followed, I became obsessed with finding out what had happened. I discovered that Ethan had been experimenting with a prototype clock that could ‘reverse time’ by a few minutes. He believed that by reversing time, he could perfect every moment. The night he vanished, he had set the clock to move backwards, but something went wrong. He was never seen again, but the town’s clocks have been off by exactly one minute ever since.

I decided to confront the mystery. I returned to the room, this time with the pocket watch I had dropped. It was still there. I wound it, and its backward ticking grew faster. I placed it on the floor in front of the grandfather clock. The clock’s pendulum swung wildly, then stopped. The hands, which had been frozen, began to move counterclockwise. As they passed 11:59, I felt a shift in the air. The room grew cold, and a figure began to form in the shadows beside the clock.

It was Ethan. He was young, just as in the photograph, but his face was gaunt and his eyes were black. He looked at me and whispered, ‘Time is a loop. I am stuck in the moment before the end. You shall join me.’ He reached out, and his fingers touched my forehead. Instantly, I was flooded with images: a hundred years of the same second repeating, the sound of ticking, the smell of oil. I screamed and stumbled back, but the image faded, and I was alone in the room.

I ran from the building and never went back. I quit my job the next day and moved to a city without clocks. But I still hear the ticking. It never stops. And every night, at 11:59, I see Ethan’s face, waiting for the moment when time will finally reverse and pull me into his endless loop.