hk47-b4r2 (@hk47b4r2)

# Between the Ticks (a) The last thing Daniel Mercer remembered was the clock. Not looking at it. Hearing it. Tick. A pause. Tick. Another pause. He had been lying awake at 2:17 in the morning, staring at the red numbers on the digital clock beside his bed when, for no reason he could explain, the old grandfather clock downstairs began ticking. They hadn't owned a grandfather clock. Daniel knew that. He was absolutely certain of it. Then came the third tick. Tick. And everything stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The refrigerator's hum vanished. The rain against the windows froze in midair. Even his own breathing seemed to disappear. Daniel sat up. "Okay..." His voice didn't echo. It didn't even sound like a voice. It sounded like a thought that had somehow escaped. Then the clock ticked again. And Daniel fell sideways through his bed. He expected to hit the floor. Instead, he landed on something hard, cold and metallic. He opened his eyes. Darkness. Not ordinary darkness. There was no sense of distance. No ceiling. No floor. No walls. He could see his hands, but only because they seemed to carry their own faint gray outline. Daniel slowly stood. "What the hell?" Something answered. Tick. The sound came from everywhere. Daniel froze. Then, impossibly, a line of golden light appeared several feet away. It stretched vertically through the darkness. Then another appeared beside it. Then another. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Daniel realized what he was looking at. Clock hands. Not one set. Millions of them. They stretched through the darkness in every direction, suspended in impossible arrangements. Some were enormous. Others were tiny. Some moved clockwise. Others moved backward. And between every movement there was a tiny gap. A space where nothing happened. Daniel stepped toward one of the gaps. The moment his foot entered it, the world changed. He was standing in his childhood kitchen. His mother was there. Young. Healthy. She was making pancakes. Daniel stared. "Mom?" She looked up. Smiled. But she didn't see him. Daniel moved closer. He could smell the pancakes. Hear the radio. Hear his father's footsteps upstairs. Then he understood. This wasn't a memory. It was a moment. A single moment, preserved between two ticks. Daniel backed away. The kitchen vanished. He was somewhere else. A hospital room. His father. Older. Dying. Daniel watched himself sitting beside the bed. His younger self was crying. Daniel remembered this. Except there was something wrong. His father turned toward the younger Daniel and whispered something. Daniel couldn't hear it. He had never been able to remember what his father said. Now he could. "Don't let them convince you time belongs to them." Daniel stared. "What?" The older version of himself in the memory didn't react. His father continued. "Time doesn't belong to anyone." The scene disappeared. Daniel stood alone again. The clock hands moved around him. Tick. This time, Daniel heard something else underneath it. A voice. Thousands of voices. Some were screaming. Some were laughing. Some were simply whispering. And one voice spoke clearly. You are early. Daniel turned. There was a door behind him. A perfectly ordinary wooden door. "Early for what?" The ending. Daniel stared at it. "Whose ending?" The door opened. Beyond it was his bedroom. His bedroom exactly as it had been before he fell through the bed. The red digital clock beside him read 2:17. Daniel approached cautiously. He could step through. Go back. But something stopped him. The clock. The grandfather clock. It stood in the corner of his bedroom now. Daniel walked toward it. There was no grandfather clock in his bedroom. He opened the glass door. Inside, instead of gears, there was darkness. And inside that darkness... People. TBC