Time is precious. It drips away slowly, painfully, like blood from a wound. Once we lose it, we never get it back; Perhaps no one understands this as much as my family.
You see, we are marked. Or maybe a better word would be…timed? I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I don’t want to ramble. Time is ticking. My brother and I lived as ordinary a life like everyone else, right up until the day we found them. The Venerated Ones.
He was thirteen and I was nine. We were playing one of my favorite games: Hide and seek. I remember listening intently as Horace counted down from 30: “…23…22…21….”
He already knew all of my hiding spots, but I was prepared to throw him a curveball this time. Mom and dad weren’t home, so I was going to finally go to the one place we were forbidden to enter: The attic. I tugged at the cord with the stick dad kept in the hall closet, and watched as the little ladder came tumbling down. I felt an immense amount of trepidation, though I chalked it up to the fact that I was being deliberately disobedient. I climbed up the ladder and pulled it back up behind me.
The attic was completely dark, and there was so much dust that I sneezed loudly. I hoped that Horace hadn’t heard me. I dashed across the room, past boxes and old books, and looked around desperately for a place to hide. That was when I saw the purple curtain. It seemed to be billowing, though there was no air and certainly no windows up there. I paid no mind to it; I just wanted a good place to hide. I ran up to the curtain and yanked it aside.
Before me, on a table draped in what looked like brown leather, was a row of nine hourglasses. The hourglasses were quite large, made out of what looked like ivory and glass, and each had black sand in it. Five of them were undisturbed, no sand pouring, but four of them, spaced out indiscriminately, were slowly seeping sand through the narrow crevice within. I can’t explain it, but I found myself transfixed; I was only snapped out of my daze when a hand touched my shoulder.
“Whoa!” I yelped, whirling around. Horace stood there, looking confused.
“You little asshole you left the stick in the hall. What are you doing up here? Mom and dad will…what are those things?”
When Horace and I questioned our parents about the hourglasses, I was sent to my room while they had a discussion with Horace. When I saw him next, Horace seemed to have lost all of the light in his eyes. I prodded him for information, but all he did was tell me that if I went into the attic again, I would be given up for adoption. That was enough to keep me sincere. I eventually forgot about our little adventure up into the attic…until, when I was 15, and my grandmother passed away. My father took me aside to give me the typical life and death talk. Only this one wasn’t so typical.
“Listen, son, I know this is gonna be hard to take in, especially with…all of us grieving…but you must know. Now is as good a time as any. I’m not trying to be funny, and I’m not pulling your leg. Everything I say from here on is true, and extremely vital. A couple of centuries ago, we had an ancestor make a deal with…something. It gave him everything he wanted, but it wasn’t without a price. He was cursed to know the day of his death, as were the other members of his family…nine in total.”
I listened with dread, unable to completely process what I was hearing. This sounded like an old folk tale, but the look on my father’s face told me otherwise.
“It bestowed upon each of them an hourglass…and for each generation since then, only nine of our family have been allowed to be alive at a time.”
“What happens if there are more than nine?” I asked, and, somehow, my father seemed to grow even more dour.
“Only nine,” he repeated. “Every time one of us is born, the…the Timekeeper flips one of the hourglasses. And the cycle goes on. We are always welcome to peer upon the Venerated Ones, but why would one want to fill one’s self with such dread? Many in our line have perished by their own hands. Many have drained the last grains of their own sand. But remember this, son: the Venerated are to be treated and respected with much care. They must never be touched, unless you want to potentially kill a relative with your recklessness.”
I didn’t want to believe him. After our conversation I ventured up to the attic for only the second time in my life. I pulled aside the curtain and peered at the hourglasses. Only three continued to slowly seep their black sand.
I believed him.
When one has such knowledge about these things, it is best to put it in the back of one’s head. If not, the magnitude of such knowledge could consume you. I went on living my life, knowing, but not thinking about, the hourglasses or the…Timekeeper. My brother and I both eventually married, and as soon as he found out his wife was pregnant with twins, he was quick to tell me. There would be five of us now. My own son, Timothy, blessed us with his presence a couple of years later. This was when I fucked up.
He was so precious, so beautiful, that I couldn’t bear to see him have to go through the same hell that my brother and I had to. I didn’t want him going mad from the pressure of looking at his own hourglass, or being indebted to some creature that haunted our family centuries ago. So on the night that he was born, I crept up into the attic of my parent’s house. I peered upon the Venerated Ones, noting the single one that had obviously just began sifting it’s sand, with so, so much more left over. I was determined to break this cycle, once and for all…and so I flipped the hourglass back over. I watched as what little sand had already passed drifted slowly back in with the rest. And then I waited. Hopefully this hadn’t backfired.
When I returned home, my son was still alive and well. I rejoiced…for the first few years anyway. Tim turned out to be quite the troublemaker, fighting other kids at school, being disrespectful to myself and his mother, and even threatening to “kill everyone” someday. One day, when Tim was around nine years old, tragedy struck. My wife’s car was hit by an eighteen-wheeler and flipped over the side of the freeway. She was unrecognizable….I had to identify her by her tattoo on her thigh. The other passenger in the car, our son Tim, however, had miraculously survived the accident.
As Tim continued his disturbing behavior, I found myself hating him. Why was I cursed to care for this demon, while my wife’s life had been violently taken away? What kind of world did we live in? I fell into a depression and talked with my brother about my troubles. When I told him about what I had done with Tim’s hourglass the day he was born, Horace stood up.
“It all makes sense now…you disrupted the cycle…”
“I had to, Horace…he was so full of life, I didn’t want to condemn him…”
“You’ve condemned all of us in the process. Look, I really think he had something to do with Ana’s death…and you do too, I know it. I won’t ask you to fix this yourself. Despite everything, he’s your boy. I’ll take care of it myself. And I won’t tell dad what you’ve done.”
I wish I could say I argued. I wish I could say I tried to convince my brother not to murder my ten year old son. But I didn’t. I wanted him out of my life. He was nothing like me, and he damn sure wasn’t anything like his mother.
I waited outside the bedroom as Horace entered with a pillow. He wanted to end Tim as painlessly as possible. I remember hearing my son as he struggled under his uncle’s grasp. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I listened and waited for it to stop. And waited. And waited.
Nearly four whole minutes had gone by and Tim still had not stopped fighting, though the pillow was place firmly over his face. When Horace finally stepped back, looking shocked, Tim sat straight up, hellfire in his eyes.
“Fuck you,” he hissed, and Horace quickly retreated from the room.
It didn’t seem possible…but had I somehow made my son immune to death? I wanted to have a sit down with my father and brother, but that was not to be. Horace died from a heart attack two days after his attempt to kill Tim. After dropping Tim, who didn’t even pretend to be sad, off at school, I went up into the attic. One of the hourglasses had been shattered on the floor.
Pt.2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/dl43pz/everyone_in_my_family_is_assigned_an_hourglass/