The sound of the clock echoed in the room like an echo of time slipping through her fingers. At first, Marisa had found the old wall clock in her grandfather’s house to be a fascinating object, with its intricate details and the soft ticking that seemed to envelop her in a nostalgic atmosphere. However, after her grandfather’s death, that clock became a constant reminder of the absence she felt, and over time, she began to perceive something strange in its functioning.
In the first few nights, the clock marked hours that did not match reality. One day, while sitting in the living room, she noticed that the hands had stopped at 3:33. A chill ran through her when she remembered that her grandfather always said that hour was a bad omen. She curled up on the sofa, and in her mind echoed the warnings about cursed objects, but she quickly dismissed the idea as nonsense.
As the days passed, the tension in the house increased. Shadows seemed to stretch, and the noises at night became more unsettling. One day, Marisa received a call from an old friend who informed her that his mother had died in an accident. As she faced the loss, the hands of the clock seemed to move with an unsettling rhythm, as if foretelling other tragic events.
That night, while mourning the loss of her friend, the clock emitted a peculiar sound. It was a tinkling she had never heard before. As she approached, she noticed the hands spinning erratically. A shiver ran down her spine, and she decided to ignore it, but the next morning, she received another call: her neighbor had been found dead in his home.
The days turned into a spiral of unexpected deaths: coworkers, friends, and even a distant family member. Marisa began to lose her sanity. The only constant in her life was the clock, which seemed to move uncontrollably every time a tragedy was announced. Desperate, she decided to seek answers. She delved into her grandfather’s memories, trying to find clues in his old letters and journals.
In one of them, she discovered a reference to the clock, which had belonged to an old man who supposedly could predict death. As she read, a sense of terror overwhelmed her. She wondered if her grandfather had known and had kept the clock in the family as a form of warning. That night, she gathered her courage and decided to do what she had never done: try to stop the clock.
With a screwdriver in hand, she approached the clock, and just as she was about to open it, a loud crash resonated through the house. The lights flickered, and in a moment of confusion, she felt trapped between reality and a nightmare. The hands began to spin faster, and the sound of ticking transformed into a deafening roar.
In that chaos, Marisa saw fleeting visions of the faces of the people she had lost, their gazes filled with despair and pain. She felt time crumbling around her, and in a surge of impulse, she broke the glass of the clock. The moment she did, the noise stopped abruptly, and the room was plunged into a deadly silence.
When she regained her composure, she realized that the clock had stopped working. But a new terror engulfed her: the air felt dense and heavy, and a sense of emptiness surrounded her. Then, a piercing scream pierced through her, and as she turned, she saw her own reflection in a nearby mirror. It was a pale reflection, with empty eyes, and suddenly she understood the truth. By breaking the clock, she had not only freed time; she had also released her own soul.
With the broken clock at her feet, time no longer held meaning. She was trapped in a limbo, condemned to relive each of the deaths she had witnessed, always as a spectator, an echo of her own existence. The door to the room slammed shut, and Marisa realized that the clock had marked her own death, a death from which she could never escape. In the darkness, the sound of ticking echoed again, a reminder that time had not ended, but had begun anew, and she was part of the endless cycle.