When I first opened the package, I was bamboozled. I found something completely unlike the product I’d seen in the IKEA store. A clock with the number 13 unwillingly wedged between 12 and 1.
As I would soon learn, however, it was exactly as intended.
After overcoming the initial annoyance, I hung the inaccurate clock on the wall, much to the amusement of my girlfriend, Reya. We had a good laugh about it after work.
Later, we found ourselves slumped on the sofa, binge-watching episodes of The Office way past midnight. Every few minutes, I’d glance at the IKEA clock and chuckle to myself. I was bemused at the thirteen numbers crammed uneasily and unevenly around the outer perimeter. Silly sardines in a tin can.
There was nothing silly about what happened when the clock struck 13.
In a moment of harrowing horror, Reya vanished. And then the lights in my house followed suit, as did the lights of every house outside my window, in rapid succession.
I sprinted from room to room in a frenzy, calling for Reya, but there was no answer.
After ten minutes of fruitless searching, I ran into the street. My neighbourhood had been plunged into darkness. And it was no isolated event. Even as I headed farther into the town, I found no signs of life. Not a light. Not a car on the road. Not a soul.
I started to scream manically, succumbing to the terrifying concept of being perpetually alone in an icy, lifeless version of Earth. I truly thought the world had ended.
And then, just as suddenly as it stopped, everything sprang back to life. I had returned home at that point, and I was sitting on the sofa, head in my hands. The lights suddenly returned. So did The Office. And so, most reassuringly of all, did Reya. The horrifying hour in an apocalyptic world suddenly made sense.
Time had frozen.
“What’s up with you? Is Michael Scott making you cry?” Reya teased.
“Oh…” I frantically searched for an explanation, overwhelmed with relief at my girlfriend’s sudden reappearance. “I just have a headache… I’m gonna head to bed.”
I prayed for it to be an isolated incident, but no such luck.
At work, the horror repeated itself. I gained an hour of time in an empty world. The analogue office clock froze on the number 1. Back home, my IKEA clock would be ticking past 13. The only thing, other than me, with motion in that dimension.
Trapped with my thoughts in that husk of an office, I eyed the deserted city from a high-rise window. And that was when I recalled my conversation with Reya the day before.
“I love the clock, but on a serious note… you’ve asked for a replacement, right?” She asked.
“Why? I’ve always wanted extra hours in the day!” I laughed.
Extra hours in the day. That sparked something in my mind. I remembered the employee I’d met in IKEA on my lunch break, a few weeks prior. Jacob.
“How does your delivery service work?” I asked.
“Ah, no room in the car for everything you want?” Jacob asked.
“It’s not that,” I said. “No time.”
He nodded and smiled. “I used to be like you. But I found a way to make time.”
I always hated that phrase. Making time. What an impossibility. A suggestion often spouted by people with fewer responsibilities.
As I stared at an inexplicably lifeless city from my office window, encaged in that paused moment for an hour, everything came together. The mysterious man had done this to me. He’d deliberately given me the clock. That had to be it. That’s always the case, right? It’s always the unnerving shopkeeper.
And yet, I still decided to use the clock to my advantage. I’m greedy. I’m human.
The soundless, motionless world I entered during those two extra daily hours never ceased to horrify me, but I saw that fear as the price for such an amazing gift. A gift that afforded time to finish work, exercise, read, and so on.
The true price became terribly clear after two years of enjoying the fruits of my labours.
The list of life improvements seemed endless. I’d been promoted to vice president of the company at which I worked. I was in the best physical health of my life. I was always well-rested. I’d married. And, speaking of which, I had so much more time for my wife, Reya.
But something was very wrong. Something foggy in my mind — a terrifying truth that incessantly eluded me.
Reya had just given birth to our baby. Bobby. Even with an additional two hours per day, the strain of parenthood was immense. I would get as much work done as possible at 13 o’clock, so as to carry more of the parenting burden, but it didn’t seem to be enough. Reya was tired.
More than that.
She was greying.
“I’m only 32,” She groaned, cradling a silver strand of hair in her hands.
I hugged my wife from behind. “It makes you look distinguished. You’re beautiful.”
“Being a mother is killing me,” She sniffled.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. I gained my first grey hairs in my late twenties, so I thought Reya to be lucky in that she’d only just noticed her first one — obviously, I didn’t voice that thought aloud.
But still, as the weeks went by, there was a growing fogginess in my mind — an ever-thickening cloud. It was more than tiredness from the pressures of fatherhood. I was blind to something. And that scared me. I think the clock itself was disjointing my mind.
Everything became all too clear after a hospital appointment about our baby.
“Bobby is three months old, right?” Dr Hill asked, frowning.
Reya nodded, rubbing the bags beneath her eyes. “Yep.”
“Hmmm,” Dr Hill said. “He’s just so…”
“— Big,” Reya finished. “Why is he growing so fast, Dr Hill?”
The doctor was just as bewildered as us, and that filled me with a haunting feeling. Something I’d been overlooking for weeks on end.
Bobby. Reya. They were both ageing far too quickly.
Terror consumed me, all at once, in a roaring, relentless wave of emotion. I finally noticed my wife’s wrinkles. Her numerous strands of grey hair. She’d aged about twenty years. And Bobby? Three-month-old Bobby? He looked like a fully-grown toddler.
Was the clock stealing time from them?
“We initially thought it could be Progeria,” Dr Hill said. “But the tests came back negative, so truthfully, we have absolutely no idea why Bobby is ageing so rapidly. In your case, Reya, I’d say stress has affected your body.”
Reya and I decided that it was time to move away from the city, so I bought a beautiful cottage in the country. I planned to work remotely, as did she.
Most importantly, on the day we left, I destroyed the IKEA clock. No more playing with time.
And yet, on the drive to our new home in the country, time still froze at what would’ve been 13 o’clock.
My wife and baby vanished from the car, and the vehicle immediately halted. Every other car on the road froze too, littering the tarmac with ghostly hulks of metal.
I found myself sitting there, hands white-knuckling the steering wheel in disbelieving fear as I surveyed the empty world which had been haunting me for over two years.
Except it wasn’t empty.
At the edge of the tree line, beside the road, a shape moved.
It looked like a stick insect on hind legs — frightfully thin, blending in with the oak trees which partially shrouded it from view.
Then the creature scuttled into the road, spindling towards our car at a rapid pace. I screamed, opening the door and fleeing from the impossibly fast creature.
Weaving between abandoned cars, I took a risky glance over my shoulder, screeching at the nightmarish creature with wobbly limbs.
I had no hope of escaping. I thought about circling back to the car and taking my chances by hiding out in there, but then I felt a sharp blade pierce my upper back.
I tumbled to the gravel and spun around to eye the faceless monstrosity which hovered above me. I’ve never been so frightened — not of death, but whatever torturous punishment the thing had in store for me.
I understood everything when I gazed upon the creature. I knew that it was Time itself. And there is nothing more frightening than reckoning with a force far greater than you could ever hope to be. A horrifying force that views you as a bug.
In my case, a meddling bug.
But it hadn’t come to scold me for spending two years escaping time — rather, to scold me for escaping my fate.
There were no words from the being to convey this fact. How could the haunting abomination speak with no mouth, after all? And yet, I knew that it had come for me because I destroyed the clock.
I also understood that its stick-like form was an illusion — a physical image conjured to prevent my mind from imploding. Nobody can truly look upon time. It’s not an impossibility, but a horror beyond horrors.
The being left a gift-wrapped circular parcel on my chest, and I gulped in terror, knowing exactly what I would find inside. Then I watched the omnipotent insect disappear down the road.
I prepared to lumber back to the car, but something horrifyingly unexpected happened. A punishment for shirking Time’s gift to me, perhaps.
I didn’t get the whole hour.
In an instant, every car on the road surged into motion. I ducked and threw my hands over my head as two vehicles swerved to avoid me.
Reya and Bobby.
I swivelled my head to see, a hundred yards up the road, our red Toyota Yaris veering towards the trees.
Memories of that day are hazy. I try so hard to forget it. My beautiful wife — grey-haired and aged beyond comprehension — lay lifeless on a stretcher. The paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene. A horror that, years later, never leaves me. A deep, unyielding grief.
Bobby made it to the hospital and survived, thankfully. A six-month-old boy roughly six years of age in the eyes of the staff.
For the years that followed, out of spite, I stopped utilising the two extra hours. I watched my son grow at a horribly phenomenal rate. Any moments of joy were overshadowed by the terror of watching a child age more rapidly than their parent. I was haunted by what was to come.
He swiftly overtook me. And five years later, my worst nightmare came to fruition. Bobby was an old man. Dying on his bed in the cottage that I’d bought only several years prior, when he’d been but a baby boy.
“Dad,” He whispered on that final day.
“Yes, Bobby?” I sobbed uncontrollably.
“I know you tried once,” He wheezed. “But try again. Destroy it.”
After my boy passed, I grieved for months before I thought of that infernal clock again. The hellish thing that had butchered my wife and son in the blink of an eye.
More time? What a twisted, evil lie. I’d been robbed of a life with my family. There is no greater horror than that. But I suppose all of that added time had to come from somewhere. It was an unthinkable price.
Fuelled by hatred, I rang the IKEA branch, fully intending to exact some form of retributive justice on the man responsible for my years of torment. But I received some ghastly news.
Jacob went missing several years before I even stepped into the store. He wasn’t even an employee at that time. Apparently, his family members — well, their teeth and ashes — were found in the man’s living room.
It’s clear that Jacob suffered the same punishment as me, but what happened to him? Why did he return to the store to pass this horrifying curse onto an unsuspecting soul?
So many awful unknowns. I pray the clock doesn’t corrupt me in the same way.
It still haunts me. But at least I have no loved ones left for it to take. And I intend to keep it that way until my dying day.
I wish I had a happy ending for you, but life is seldom full of anything other than suffering. I’m not an old man, but the beauty of having extra time is that I’ve gained wisdom. Excruciating wisdom.
Time is a horror that comes for us all, one way or another.