Reverse Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Chase
couldn’t control the clock, but the clock could control Chase. Chase felt terrible
being victim to the whims of a man-made machine. It didn’t seem right. But
somehow this timepiece machination had proved to be his superior.
To
make matters worse, the clock was hardly functional. At random and oddly
significant moments, it ran backwards. The pendulum would simply pause for a
moment and then change directions. The gears inside would reverse. The hands on
the face would run the wrong way. It moved in time rather well, a second was
still a second, a minute was still a minute and so on and so forth, but instead
of running from 1 to 12 it ran perfectly in reverse from 12 to 1. Sometimes
this lasted for a moment or two, sometimes much longer. Chase would catch it
sometimes and try to reverse the process, but was unable to reset the machine.
When it wanted to run backwards, it ran backwards. Then, when a seemingly
random, but likely pre-ordained and highly specific, amount of time had passed
the clock would simple pause again and return to keeping time in the more
traditional forward manner.
It
should be mentioned for the sake of clarity, that the clock wasn’t magical. Or
not that Chase could detect. Time, actual time, kept moving forward, even if
the clock was going backwards. Very early on in the process, Chase had been
prone to test this and make sure there wasn’t something on a grander scale
going on. He used other timekeepers to make sure all of them were indeed moving
forward. He contacted other people to make sure wherever they were when the backwards
clock was counting back, that they were still moving forwards. He had taken the
clock to other places, filmed it and himself, and most anything else he could
think of to make sure that he and the world around him were all moving forward
just because this clock wasn’t.
Of
course with that said, it is also true that Chase wasn’t really familiar with
magic and how magic worked, so despite his experiments there was always some
chance that the clock in its way was doing something quite out of the ordinary
even if in a very small way. Perhaps there was a clock shaped pocket of
space-time that was out of whack with the rest of the continuum. Perhaps the
clock itself was somehow generating dimensional rules of its own. Chase hadn’t
thought about some of these questions but even if he had, they would have just
confused the issue more and he really would have had no way of testing or
proving any of that.
Chase had spent time fighting with the clock and trying to
convince it to run properly. He had taken it to be repaired and retooled and re-geared.
No one ever found anything wrong with the mechanisms inside. There was no
reason for it to do what it did.
So Chase resigned himself to having to simple reset the time
whenever the clock finally decided to start running the right way again. It
wasn’t a very good clock to have. It wasn’t functional at all. It’s a wonder
that Chase kept it. Chase told himself that but for the fact that it was so
unique and strange, he would have destroyed or gotten ride of it. But really it
was because he knew the clock had won. It had beaten him and broken him and in
that way it had a hold over him. Chase didn’t understand it on that level, but
unconsciously he knew he was powerless against it. The clock had won and
whatever it was counting down each time it ran in reverse, it would go right on
doing so, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
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