The Clockwork Heart

May 7, 2015

by Charlotte

When I first set foot in the redbrick apartment at 7B, I felt a strange weight settle on my chest, as if the very air was dense with memory. The previous tenant had left a grandfather clock in the corner — its pendulum frozen, its face cracked. I should have taken it as an omen, but I needed a place quickly, and the rent was too good to pass up.

Within a week, oddities began. My grandmother’s locket vanished from the dresser and reappeared in the sugar bowl. My keys, always left by the door, turned up in the refrigerator. At first, I blamed my own forgetfulness, my chaotic schedule as a night-shift nurse. But then my little terrier, Biscuit, started barking at the clock — not the wall where it stood, but at the air just beside it, as if something invisible lurked there.

A month in, the dreams started. I would wake at 3:33 to the sound of ticking — but the clock was broken. The ticking came from inside the walls. My partner, Leo, said I was imagining things. Then one night, we both heard it: a low growl, like something large and animalistic, ringing from the roof above our bedroom. Leo grabbed a can of pepper spray and went to the fire escape. He found nothing but a stray cat — a black one that hissed and fled. But the growling continued, sometimes at the front door, sometimes at the window, always just after sunset.

I grew desperate. My cousin, a deacon, came over with holy water and incense. As he prayed, the clock chimed — a deep, sonorous bong that shook the floor. We froze. The clock had not worked in years. When he left, the ticking resumed, softer, almost expectant.

Then I began to see the shapes. A tall, dark figure would stand at the foot of our bed, watching. A smaller, brighter form would dart down the hallway, sometimes taking the shape of Biscuit, though Biscuit was always with me. One evening, I saw the clock’s pendulum swing on its own, and in its reflection, a woman with hollow eyes stared back at me — not my reflection, but a stranger’s. I blinked, and she was gone.

The worst came when I found the locket again — this time inside the clock’s case, hidden behind the gears. I pried it open and found a photograph of a family I did not know: a mother, a father, a child. And on the back, in faded ink, was a date — the same date I had moved in, exactly fifty years prior. The clock, I realized, was not a piece of furniture. It was a keeper of time, and I had stepped into its domain.

Now, I lie awake each night, listening to the ticking grow louder, feeling the air thicken with presences. Last night, I saw the bright shape again — it was the child from the photograph, beckoning me toward the clock. Leo had left me. The landlord has stopped answering my calls. The clock’s hands have begun to move backward, and I know that something is waiting for me to wind it, to keep the heart of this apartment beating. I am afraid of what will happen when it finally stops.

I have not slept in three days. The shapes are always there now, just beyond my sight. And tonight, I heard the clock chime thirteen times. I know I should leave, but I cannot. Something in this place has taken root in me, and I fear that the only way to escape is to step into the clock’s embrace — to become a new photograph, a new memory, a new soul trapped in its eternal ticking.

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