The Watcher's Hour

I turned the pocket watch over in my palm and inspected it in the candlelight, its gold casing tarnished and stained by age, a delicate thread of a crack splintering the glass. I was pleased with my discovery, despite its broken state. Antiques fascinated me—it was what brought me to this desolate town in the first place, its Victorian Gothic charm. All the houses here seemed to be preserved in an entirely different century, the neighbors elusive, with the neighborhood cloaked under a constant, suffocating fog. The previous owner of the house had left an impressive collection of junk scattered messily throughout the rooms, death having left no time for tidying up. I had just recently found the pocket watch amongst these piles, glinting at me in the shadows. Tapping the glass lightly with my finger, eyebrows furrowed, I noted how the hour hand didn't budge in the slightest, being stuck at the one. I concluded that there must have been some sort of error in the winding mechanism, which I had no intention of fixing. Pocketing it nonetheless, I wandered to the windowsill overlooking the street when something peculiar caught my eye.

Across the road, in my neighbor’s window, a figure stood, its head tilted vaguely to the right. I couldn’t decipher it easily in the shadows, but its limbs appeared grotesquely elongated, its complexion a pale gray, like a botched imitation of a human. It had a haggard appearance, with its mouth hung open, gaping like a corpse, face drooping inhumanly. But it was the eyes that were most disturbing—pure white, void of any pupils or irises—aimed directly at me. My stomach dropped. I was too paralyzed to scream, fear coiling in my gut. I was convinced that I was either hallucinating or overly fatigued from a lack of sleep. I tore my gaze away from the window and crawled under the bed covers, pulse quickening, desperate to erase the image from my mind.

But the next day, I saw it again. This time, I was unsuspectingly roaming in the distant woods behind my backyard, when out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed its tall misshapen body. There it stood once more, eerily still among the trees, its head crooked a little further right. I felt an odd urge to grab my watch then, reaching my quivering hand into my coat pocket. Strangely enough, the hand of my pocket watch had moved to the two. I looked up at the creature and back down at the watch, not missing the way the hand precisely mimicked the figure's angle. My mouth went dry. Shaking, I fought the urge to scream as I ran, its white eyes still searing into my brain.

Over the next nine days, the figure became a sickening, terrifying recurrence, appearing in various locations. On the third day, I spotted it perched freakishly on the roof of an abandoned shed, head cocked 90 degrees to the three o’clock, then, the day after, standing motionless in the center of a wheat field, head bent all the way to the four. I swore I glimpsed its reflection in a dark puddle of rain on the street, and again down the hall of my own house—that occasion, head fully upside down at six. It appeared in a dark closet, behind me in the bathroom mirror, inside a painting on the wall, between the gravestones of the town cemetery, and finally, on my bedroom balcony at night. Each sighting felt like a slow, agonizing descent into madness. It never spoke, never moved, just stared. Its mouth was always unsettlingly frozen in that silent scream. I had no one to confide in; they wouldn’t believe me. I was certain that this horrifying figure was visible to me alone, as its presence around the town garnered no reaction beyond my own. As my watch’s hand crept forward each day, the figure’s head tilted ominously with it—until it reached the 11th hour.

By that eleventh day, I’d fully believed I’d lost my mind. I awoke in a cold sweat that night, jerking my body from slumber, desperate to escape the visions of the being that had begun to haunt my dreams. For a while, I laid in bed, staring at the canopy, contemplating whether I had turned irreversibly ill with madness. All of a sudden, a strange, inexplicable compulsion gnawed at me, drawing me from my bed and down the staircase into the backyard. The pocket watch tickled softly and urgently, and I shoved it into my pocket angrily, its glass wrecked even further from the countless times I tried but failed to destroy it. An invisible force seemed to be guiding me deeper into the shadows. My limbs grew unbearably heavy, as though becoming longer and longer. While my sleep-induced haze faded, my vision gradually blurred in and out, eyes rolling back in my head, and I felt all awareness slipped away. Panic surged as I tried to turn back, but my body betrayed me, muscles refusing as I was compelled to the edge of the woods. I stood there, blinded and alone in the dark, thoughts drifting, and unable to stop it as my head tilted to the angle of 11 o’clock. My feet shifted unsteadily beneath me, and then, with a sharp jolt, the hour hand snapped to 12, my head snapping with it upright. The pocket watch flew from my grip, and with what little consciousness I had, I understood, with certainty, that I had become something empty and twisted.

Now, I remain here, waiting for the next soul to stumble upon the cursed pocket watch. When they do, its hand will move an hour each day, and my head will tilt with it. I will haunt them until they too find themselves irresistibly drawn to the same fate. Only then, will they take my place, seeking their own victim, as did the poor soul before me, and only then, perhaps, will I be freed at last.