The Watchmaker’s Favor

I started staying over at Elias’s place during the long, rain-heavy autumn. His house was a converted Victorian on the edge of town, with peeling wallpaper and a furnace that groaned like a dying animal in the basement. That’s where we watched movies—relegated to that damp, low-ceilinged room with its single flickering lamp and a couch that smelled of dust and old cigarettes. I didn’t mind. It was a place out of time, and being with Elias made it feel almost magical.

One evening, as the rain hammered against the tiny ground-level windows, I was fiddling with the watch he’d given me for our six-month anniversary. It was beautiful—a silver band with delicate links, and a face that caught the lamplight like a moon. But it was too big, slipping around my wrist, and I’d been meaning to get it sized for weeks. I held up my arm, letting it dangle, and said, ‘Look how loose it is. It might just fall off.’

As if on cue, the watch slipped over my hand and dropped into the crack between the couch cushions. I fished it out, but something felt different. The band was snug, not tight, but perfectly fitted to my wrist. Elias blinked, then ran his fingers along the seam. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘You’d need to remove a link. And reconnect the clasp.’ We dug through the cushions, and there, lodged deep in the fabric, was a single silver link—the exact one that would have to be removed. But it was clean, polished, as if someone had placed it there.

We stared at each other, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t alone. The air in the basement was heavy, still, save for the hum of the old furnace. I remembered Elias telling me that this house had been a funeral home in the 1920s, and that the basement had once held the embalming room. I’d always laughed it off, but now the silence felt crowded.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay on Elias’s creaky bed upstairs, the watch on my nightstand, ticking with a rhythm that didn’t match my own heart. Around 3 a.m., I heard a sound—a faint, metallic click, like a tiny tool snapping shut. I held my breath, listening. Then I heard footsteps in the hall, slow and deliberate. They stopped outside the door. I didn’t dare move. The doorknob turned, and for a moment, I saw a shape in the doorway—not Elias, but something taller, thinner, wearing a long coat. It stood there for a long heartbeat, then faded.

I convinced myself it was a dream. But the next morning, when I went down to the basement to retrieve my phone, I found the television on, static hissing. And on the coffee table, next to a vase of dead flowers, was a tiny screwdriver—the kind used for watch repair. It was rusted, but it looked new in that dusty room.

Days passed, and the house seemed to grow more aware of me. Objects moved in the periphery of my vision. The staircase groaned under no one. One night, I was reading alone in the basement while Elias was at a late shift. I looked up from my book to see the watch—which I’d left upstairs—sitting on the arm of the couch, fully assembled, the clasp gleaming. I picked it up, and it felt warm. The second hand was moving, but it was ticking backward.

I ran up the stairs, heart pounding, and I found the cellar door at the top of the stairs ajar. I slammed it shut and locked it, but as I turned, I saw that the watch was now on my wrist, tighter than ever, the metal cold against my skin. I tried to take it off, but the clasp wouldn’t budge. I felt a presence behind me, a cold breath on my neck, and a voice—low and dry, like rustling paper—whispered, ‘You’re keeping time now.’

I called Elias, screaming, and he came home to find me shaking in the kitchen, the watch still on my wrist. He tried to pry it off, but the clasp had somehow been soldered shut. We drove to a jeweler the next morning, and the old man behind the counter looked at the watch with a strange, knowing smile. ‘This is a fine piece,’ he said. ‘Seems it found its rightful owner.’ He took out a tiny screwdriver, the same kind I’d found in the basement, and worked on the clasp. When he finished, the watch fell open, and inside the case, engraved in tiny letters, was a name: ‘A. Grimshaw.’ I felt the blood drain from my face. The old man leaned in and said, ‘Grimshaw was the undertaker who owned this house. He was known for his meticulous work—and his obsessive nature. They say he never left the basement.’

We sold the watch that day, left the house, and moved far away. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I feel a cold metallic pressure on my wrist, and I hear the faint tick-tock of a watch that isn’t there. And I wonder if the ghost of Grimshaw the undertaker, with his tiny screwdriver, is still waiting in that quiet basement, ready to repair whatever he thinks is broken—including me.