The Castle of Clocks

It wasn’t a castle-- far from it. It was an average brick building. The building was flat and rectangular with homely goldenrod colored brick, there were small, thick glass windows on the side of the building that appeared frosted from a distance, and it was bathed softly in orange light from the emerald street lamp on the corner. Yet, it had the presence of a castle.

You open the door and turn around once to see if anyone is watching. The street is empty and damp, and you catch sight of no one except the white face of the clock embedded in the green metal of the streetlamp. It looks quietly complacently like that of a full moon. You look for the moon but find it obscured by pitch colored clouds and finally you decide to enter the building.

The door closes softly behind you and inside the hallway is completely black. You strike a match and find yourself among dozens of clocks. They hang amongst green striped wallpaper, some askew, some with cuckoo birds hanging limp, some that tick like bombs, all with pale white faces that to the naked eye are unreadable. You move further down the hall, looking at each clock with interest. They’re all unique, each like a little human. Some are plain and black and tick with moderate interest like they are working 9-5 and will soon return home to the suburbs and the wife and kids. Some are square and modern, blood red, with Mondrian like patterns that seem past their due date. Some have cuckoo birds that lay stuck or limp with clock faces that are dull and fail to tick, tick, tick. You shiver and feel goosebumps as you pass a series of cat clocks with eyes that move stealthily over your ears and eyes and ears with a grin like someone would wear under a mask when robbing a bank.

You veer away and enter a cavernous room filled with hourglasses of various sizes. You put out your patch as the few windows provide a dusk-like quality to the room where you can see just enough. The room is quiet except for the sand in the hourglasses. Their sand ceases to end as it hisses towards an ending. You pick up a rather large one that stands on black, braided wood legs. Its sand is ebony and is about to run out. You watch transfixed as each grain slips through to the other side until finally all the sand sits like dead weight at the bottom of the hourglass. You pensively stare at the sand until a loud noise wakes you. You look up and realize it came from the ominous glass clock that hangs above all the hourglasses. It is midnight as the clock bongs three, then four, then five times. It continues as you watch it, transfixed, waiting for something to happen. Finally, the twelfth bong sounds and then there’s silence. Yet you wait, and finally a loud cracking sound is heard. It starts at the base of the big glass clock and quickly slices through the entirety of it. There is a pause, and then the two severed halves fall apart and crash down upon the ground with equal force.

The glass spreads to your feet as you slowly rise. All the ticking seems to stop as you walk back to the hallway. It is dark but you feel as though you can maneuver it with your eyes closed. It’s familiar to you, like you’ve always been here. You walk briskly through the clocks that have all stopped ticking and finally reach the door. Your knuckles rap the wood as you pull open the door and walk back into the warm night. The door closes softly behind you.

The moon is out now. The night is dry and the light looks more yellow than orange. You descend the steps and feel odd. You feel quieter, heavier, older. You slowly walk down the street. You feel misplaced in this world about to dawn. You feel forgotten. How long were you in there?