For the past decade, every time Lynch entered the laboratory, the sound he heard the most was the endless "tick-tock, tick-tock," always echoing, never ceasing. It was, in fact, the only aspect of the laboratory that dissatisfied him.
But at this moment, the annoying ticking of the past was replaced by an eerie silence—every trace of it gone, leaving the whole lab enveloped in complete stillness.
Lynch looked around. The walls were adorned with all sorts of clocks: grandfather clocks, mechanical clocks, wall clocks. Beneath transparent glass domes, each hour hand and minute hand displayed different times, yet now all of them had come to an abrupt stop.
The small wooden door of a cuckoo clock was ajar, the cuckoo bird frozen mid-air. The swinging pendulum had tilted to one side and hung there, stuck.
Hands, gears, everything had ceased, as if the world itself had been frozen in time.
"What's going on?"
Surely this many clocks couldn't all be broken at the same time?
