hk47-b4r2 (@hk47b4r2)

Chapter Two: (a) The Second Tick For the first few minutes after time resumed, Daniel did nothing except stand in the middle of the street and listen to the world. Rain struck the pavement around him, tires hissed over wet asphalt, and somewhere nearby a woman was arguing with someone on her phone. The ordinary noise of life seemed almost unbearably loud after the silence he had experienced, and yet beneath all of it he could still hear the faint rhythm of the clocks around him. Every second was suddenly precious in a way it had never been before. He found himself watching people as they hurried past, wondering how many of them had any idea that they had just been absent from the universe for an interval so small that no instrument would ever record it. By the time Daniel reached home, he had begun convincing himself that the whole thing had been some elaborate hallucination brought on by exhaustion. There were rational explanations for nearly everything. A dissociative episode could account for the strange sensations. Sleep deprivation could account for the distorted perception. The apparent cessation of time might have lasted for no more than a few seconds while his mind constructed an experience that seemed much longer. The human brain was capable of extraordinary errors, and Daniel was quite prepared to believe that his had simply malfunctioned. The problem was the clock. He had left the brass clock in the kitchen when he went outside. He remembered that clearly because he had stared at it before leaving. The second hand had been slightly ahead of the twelve, exactly as he had found it before. Now it was still there, but the glass over the face had a tiny crack running diagonally from the lower edge to the center. Daniel had not broken it. He stood in the doorway staring at the crack, and gradually his certainty that he had imagined everything began to drain away. He took the clock down and carried it to the kitchen table. The crack was real. So was the faint scrape across the wooden casing where his hand had slipped when he had tried to force the second hand forward. He remembered making that mark while he had been trapped in the interval between ticks, although the memory now seemed impossible. He opened the clock. The mechanism was perfectly intact. There was no obvious reason it should have stopped. He had wound it that morning and it should have been running for another two days. Daniel checked the gears, the spring, and the escapement, finding nothing damaged. He put the clock back together and wound it again. The pendulum began to swing, the gears engaged, and for several minutes everything behaved normally. Then the second hand reached twelve. Daniel watched it move. It advanced. He waited for the next tick. Nothing happened. The second hand remained where it was. Daniel leaned closer. Another second passed. Nothing. Then, without any gradual movement, the hand jumped forward and the clock made a sound that was not quite a tick. It was softer than that, almost like a tiny click of a tongue. Daniel felt the hairs on his arms rise. He looked at his wristwatch. The second hand on the watch had stopped too. He picked it up, tapped the glass, and watched the hand remain motionless. The digital clock on the microwave still displayed the correct time, but the colon between the numbers was no longer blinking. Every clock in the apartment had stopped. Daniel moved from room to room, checking each one. The bedroom clock, the kitchen timer, his watch, the small clock on the bookshelf, even the cheap battery-powered clock in the bathroom had all stopped within the same second. He knew what that meant. It was happening again. He stepped outside. The neighborhood was moving normally. Cars passed. Leaves stirred. People walked along the sidewalks. A delivery truck turned onto the next street and disappeared from view. For several seconds Daniel simply watched. Nothing happened. Then a pigeon lifted from a telephone wire. It rose a few feet into the air, flapped twice, and stopped. Not landed. Stopped. The bird hung in the sky with its wings extended, exactly as though someone had pressed pause on a video. Daniel stopped breathing. Across the street, a woman walking a dog froze with one foot in the air. A car braking at the intersection stopped with its nose dipped toward the pavement. A fountain in a small plaza became a sculpture of suspended water. Then everything froze. Daniel looked at his watch. The second hand was moving. He stared at it in disbelief. The world outside was motionless, but his watch was ticking. Daniel slowly lifted his wrist toward his face. Tick. The sound was almost imperceptible. Tick. The second hand moved. He waited. Nothing in the world responded. Another tick. Another movement. TBC