The Unwound Hours

The summer I turned seventeen, I went with my best friend Elin to stay with her grandmother, Nan, and her grandfather, Gramps, in the hills of northern Scotland. Their house, known as the Black Croft, was a rambling stone structure that had stood for over three hundred years, with a labyrinth of outbuildings and a barn that creaked like a dying ship. It was the middle of nowhere, the nearest neighbor a mile away down a rutted track, and the only light at night came from the stars and the thin moon.

Our first night, Elin and I shared a room with a low ceiling and a window that looked out onto the moor. Elin was a sound sleeper, but I was not. I woke just after midnight to a strange sensation: a heavy weight pressing on my chest, as if someone had piled stones on me. I tried to raise my hand, but my arm wouldn’t move. I tried to call out, but my voice was a strangled whisper. I was pinned, a prisoner in my own body, while the darkness around me seemed to thicken and breathe.

The only sound was the grandmother clock in the hall below. Gramps had told us it was older than the house, brought from the old country. It had a deep, resonant chime, like a bell in a forgotten church. At one in the morning, it rang once. But then, instead of the silence that should have followed, the house held its breath. I heard a sound from the hallway outside my door: a slow, heavy footfall, as if someone was dragging a dead weight. The footsteps stopped right outside my door. Then, three enormous bangs, so loud they shook the floor, and the clock rang out again—twice, three times—as if it was angry, or trying to drown something out.

I don’t remember passing out, but I woke the next morning to sunlight streaming through the window, and Elin shaking my shoulder. She said she’d slept terribly; she’d gone to sleep in the room next to ours because she was unsettled, but she’d had nightmares of being buried alive. I told her about the bangs, but she dismissed it as the old house settling. At breakfast, I asked Gran about the clock and the noises. She looked at me with her pale, watery eyes and said, ‘That clock has always been restless on the anniversary of the fire. But it’s been dead these ten years, so I don’t know why it would start again.’

That sent a chill down my spine. I went to the grandfather clock, and sure enough, its dark wooden face was frozen at midnight, its hands unmoving, and the pendulum was still. My heart hammered. I had heard it strike, and I had heard three bangs. As I stared at the clock, I noticed something carved on the inside of the cabinet, barely visible in the light: a single name, ‘Ailis,’ and a date from over a century ago.

That afternoon, I asked Gramps about Ailis. He grew quiet, and finally said, ‘Ailis was my great-great-aunt. She was supposed to be married, but her bridegroom died in a fire the day before the wedding. They say she went mad and cursed the clock. On the night she died, she banged on the clock three times to mark the hour she was to be wed. But she was buried with her secret, and the clock’s never run right since. If you hear three bangs, it means she’s looking for her groom.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark, listening to the clock’s silence, not daring to move. At one in the morning, the clock struck once, then twice, and then the heaviness descended on me again, stronger than before. My eyes were forced toward the door, and I saw, in the pitch black, a shape darker than the darkness, slowly emerging from the wall. It was a woman in a tattered white dress, her face hidden, but her hands reaching for me. She let out a low, wet sob, and I felt her fingers brush my throat, cold as the grave. Then the clock struck a third time, and the door slammed open, and the banging—three tremendous hits—reverberated through the house, so violent that the window rattled and the pictures on the wall tilted.

When the banging stopped, the woman was gone, but the clock began to run, its pendulum swinging wildly, ticking off the minutes as if it had been wound. I scrambled out of bed, ran to the room where Elin was staying, and shook her awake. ‘We have to leave,’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘Now.’

We went to wake Gran and Gramps, but their room was empty. The bed was untouched, the covers cold. Search parties found them two days later in the barn, their bodies bloated, their faces frozen in terror, with three deep gashes across each of their chests, as if they had been struck by a huge, unseen fist. The police ruled it a freak accident, but I know the truth. The clock at the Black Croft still runs, but it never strikes the same hour twice, and I can hear it from here, three hundred miles away, counting down the seconds until I sleep again. And in the night, I feel the weight on my chest, and I know that Ailis has chosen a new groom.