Day 125 - Reverse Story

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.