Chapter 50: The Clock with No Hands
Part 2: The Tower's Mouth
The doors of the clock tower groaned open with a deep, wet sound.
Selene stood at the threshold, breath shallow. The scent of old paper and burned hair rolled out like fog, thick and oily. She hesitated—just for a second. Long enough to hear a faint whisper rise from within the tower. Welcome home. The voice was hers. Or Seraphine's. It was hard to tell anymore. Inside, the air was colder than outside, but not dead. It was alive with motion—slow, like underwater breathing. The walls pulsed faintly with a damp, reddish hue. There were no stairs. No obvious path upward. Just a vast, round chamber lined with broken clock faces, shattered mirrors, and dolls—dozens, maybe hundreds—nailed to the walls. Their eyes had been gouged out. Their mouths stitched shut. In the center of the chamber stood a spiral platform made of cracked tiles and bone, twisting upward into the shadows like a staircase carved from ribs. At its base was a large, metal lever embedded in a heart-shaped slot. Selene stepped forward. Her foot hit something soft. She looked down. A child's shoe. Small. Faded pink with a bunny on the side. There was still blood on the sole. She reached the base of the stairs. The heart-shaped slot glistened faintly. As she touched the lever, a low sound vibrated through the room. Not quite a growl. Not quite a scream. A pulse. A recognition. Then the walls began to move. The dolls turned their heads in unison. Not fast. Not violent. Slowly. Reverently. Toward her. Their mouths began to twitch, threads straining against their stitches. From them came a sound like wet cloth being ripped in half. Selene didn't scream. She climbed the stairs.
Each step groaned beneath her weight. The further up she went, the darker it became. Not for lack of light—there was still the red glow from below—but because the space itself resisted her presence. It was like walking through thick syrup, time slowing with every footfall. Halfway up, the whispers began again.
This time, she recognized them. Voices from the orphanage. Children calling her name. Blaming her. Selene, you left us. Selene, why did you run?
Selene, why didn't you burn like we did? Her hands gripped the rail. She kept moving. At the top of the staircase was a narrow doorway. On it, carved deep into the wood with something jagged, was a single word: LIAR. She pushed the door open.
What lay beyond was not the upper room of a tower.
It was a hallway.
Endless. Wooden. Flickering lights above. Dozens of doors on either side. All of them slightly ajar. All of them weeping shadows.
Behind her, the doorway sealed shut. The hallway smelled like her childhood. The one no one believed she remembered. Linoleum floors. Burnt oatmeal. Mildew. And beneath it all, that same iron-rich scent of old blood. A voice echoed from the end of the corridor. You've come far, Selene. But you'll have to walk it all again.
The doors began to open. One by one. Behind each was a piece of her past.
The first showed her bunk in the orphanage. The day she found her favorite doll cut in half. Seraphine had been framed for it. Selene never confessed it was her. She watched herself cry fake tears. The second room held a memory of the fire. Not from her view—but from Seraphine's. Trapped. Screaming. Reaching for help while Selene ran. In the third, she saw the town council. The day they came to her and begged her to "contain the evil." The pact. The ritual. The sealing. All of it, without ever admitting what they did to the children. Selene's knees buckled.
But the hallway didn't end. The clock ticked on. Still 3:00 AM. Time was no longer moving forward. Time was looping. And at the end of the hallway… the mirror waited. Tall. Warped. Waiting for her to look. Waiting for her to remember what she truly was.
Chapter 50: The Clock with No Hands
Part 3: The Time Loop
The hallway didn't end.
It twisted unnaturally in the distance, like a spine snapped in multiple places but still crawling. Its walls breathed—slow, pulsing contractions beneath layers of faded floral wallpaper. Every few seconds, black veins bulged beneath the surface, as if something enormous slithered just behind them.
Selene moved forward, not because she wanted to, but because the air behind her had gone dense and wet, pushing her forward like a throat swallowing. Her boots squelched on the floor. It wasn't wood anymore—it was soft, spongey. Organic.The light overhead flickered.It wasn't an electrical flicker.It was rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. Her own, perhaps. Or the tower's. The first door opened on its own She turned her head—slowly, knowing what she'd see and hating that she was right. Inside was her childhood bedroom. Not how she remembered it, but how it had become after the fire. Everything was covered in soot. Melted toys. A bed frame warped by heat. In the middle of the room, hunched over the charred remains of a stuffed bear, sat a child. Selene recognized her. It was her. Eight years old. Soot-streaked face. Fingernails missing. Rocking back and forth. Whimpering softly. On the walls were chalk drawings—dozens of them—of flames swallowing figures. The same drawing repeated again and again: Seraphine reaching out, and Selene walking away. The child looked up.
Her eyes were empty sockets.
"Why didn't you come back?" the child whispered, voice hollow and distant. "We waited. You promised. You let the door close."
Selene stepped back, but the hallway didn't let her go far.
The next door opened violently.
She was dragged toward it by a gust of rot-soaked wind. Inside was a dining table. Grand. Ornate. Completely out of place. It stretched into impossible distance, laid with rusted silverware and porcelain plates cracked like old bones.
Around the table sat the town elders. The ones who had made the pact. Their mouths had been sewn shut with wire. Their eyes had been replaced with the ticking faces of tiny watches. Each ticked out of sync. Maddeningly uneven. Their heads turned toward Selene in jerky, mechanical movements.
"You fed us lies," one gurgled through blood. "We dined on guilt. You served betrayal on silver platters."
Another elder began to scream—but not with sound. Her throat opened, and black moths erupted outward, filling the room. They battered Selene's face, crawling into her ears, whispering truths she refused to remember.
Selene slammed the door shut.
The hallway groaned.
It was longer now.
As if punishing her for looking away. The mirrors on the walls no longer reflected her. They showed dozens of versions of Selene. One with burnt skin and glass eyes. Another wearing a crown made of children's teeth. A third disemboweled, holding her own entrails like a child clutches a doll.
She ran.
She didn't remember choosing to. Her legs just moved.
The hallway rippled like liquid as she ran, distorting around her. Doors opened and slammed shut in sync with her heartbeat. One door flew open and revealed Seraphine's bedroom—untouched, pristine—except now it was full of flies. They moved in perfect formations, spelling out the word LIAR across the ceiling.
Selene skidded to a stop.
A figure stood at the end of the hall.
Not a shadow. Not a reflection.
Her.
But not her.
This Selene had pitch-black eyes and a mouth stitched into a smile with threads made of hair. Her arms were too long. Her fingers scraped the floor. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, showing twitching veins underneath like a map of suffering.
She cocked her head and spoke in Seraphine's voice.
"Found you."
Selene turned to run, but the hallway shifted. The floor became hands—tiny, writhing hands of children—grabbing her ankles, pulling her down. Each one sobbed as it clawed at her, screaming muffled cries from mouths sewn shut.
She fell.
Straight through the floor.
Into the clock gears.
She landed with a bone-cracking thud on a platform made entirely of ticking mechanisms. Clock hands stabbed upward like thorns. One pierced her leg. She screamed.
Blood flowed—but it wasn't red.
It was black.
And the gears began to turn faster.
Faster.
They pulled her downward, trying to drag her into the center of the mechanism.
Above her, suspended in the air like a chandelier, was a beating heart the size of a child's head. It was nailed to the gears, pulsing in time with the tower. From it hung ropes made of hair, from which dangled the dolls she had seen earlier—now alive, twitching, whispering secrets.
"You brought the curse," they hissed.
"You fed it."
"You raised it."
Selene screamed back, "I didn't know! I didn't know what would happen!
A doll's head twisted 360 degrees.
"But you wanted it to happen."
A massive chime echoed through the chamber.
DONG.
And another.
DONG.
With each toll, the heart above began to split.
A mouth opened in its center, lined with tiny human teeth.
It began to sing.
Not a song with melody. A sound that peeled her thoughts back, one by one, like old wallpaper, revealing memories she had buried deep.
The betrayal of her sister.
The night she set the fire.
The deal she made with the elders to "seal the evil," knowing they meant to trap Seraphine inside.
And worst of all—her secret joy when it was over.
Freedom.
Selene vomited onto the floor.
The gears stopped.
The dolls fell silent.
She looked up, shivering.
And Seraphine stood above her.
Not the girl she remembered, not the specter she feared.
But a thing made of shadows and burnt cloth, skin half-melted, eyes glowing like dying stars. Behind her, the tower split open into a thousand versions of itself, forming a spiral of realities.
"You left me in the fire," Seraphine whispered.
"And now I leave you in time."
With a flick of her hand, Selene was dragged upward, screaming, into the mirror at the top of the chamber.
And then—
Silence.
Nothing but ticking.
Over and over.
Forever.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.