The Hour That Stayed

11:59 PM glowed with a cold, feeble light on the flickering clock. Imani pulled on her coat and stepped out into the night. The door clicked loudly behind her. The air was sharp with frost, but the sky was clear and scattered with stars. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to smoke or just move. Her limbs had been restless all day and her thoughts hummed with nervous energy.

The village was lit up like a lantern parade. Every house and window glowed. Curtains had been left open and porch lights were on. Lamps burned in empty kitchens. There were no sounds though. She couldn’t hear any cars or dogs barking. There wasn’t even the low hum of power lines, just the brittle hush of frozen stillness.

She lit a cigarette, just to hear the sound of something. The scratch of the match was like a gunshot in the silence. She looked down at her phone: 11:59 PM. She looked back through the window to the clock inside: 11:59 PM. The second hand wasn’t moving.

She frowned and looked around again. The street was empty. The trees didn’t rustle. Down the street, a motion sensor light blinked on and didn’t turn back off.

#

Imani walked for hours. She thought it was hours, at least. The sky didn’t change, the cold didn’t deepen and the time on her phone still read 11:59 PM.

She took the main road out of the village three times. Every time, she passed the same tilted street sign, the same overturned tricycle, the same dead crow on the pavement. Every route she took brought her back to her own front gate, like the streets were loops stitched into themselves.

She tried calling 999. The ringtone echoed endlessly, before picking up and just repeating all her own words back to her. She texted her sister, watching the message send before it disappeared entirely from her phone.

She walked to her neighbours’ houses and found them inside, frozen in mid-step, mid-laugh, mid-tears. One woman stood over what must have been a boiling pot, now dry and smoking. A man grinned, unmoving, at a blank TV. Imani called their names and touched their arms. There was no reaction. Until the baby in his crib in the Hart’s house opened its eyes, blinked at her and said something that sounded like words in reverse, like tape run backwards. In the Sutherlands’ kitchen, Mr Sutherland was bleeding from the eyes in a slow, steady stream. The blood hovered in mid-air like oil in water.

Imani saw her reflection in a window, but it was wrong. It had her shape, her coat, but the eyes were somebody else’s and the mouth moved on its own. It spoke a name she no longer used, spoke it like a spell, like it owned her.

#

Sleep came like drowning. When Imani closed her eyes, a dream gripped her by the throat and pulled her under, deep into a world slick with ash and shadow. She saw the village as it must have been long ago. Lanterns swung in windless air and townsfolk gathered in a ring around a bonfire. Children watched from doorways, their faces smeared with ash. A woman stood in the middle of the circle, bound with red cord. Her body flickered like a failing image, and for a second Imani thought she herself stood there.

The faceless god came, moving without moving. It was a ripple in the air, a void. Where its face should have been was static, TV snow, insect chatter, whispers too fast to follow. It leaned in close to her and tried to speak, but the words were lost in white noise that rattled her teeth.

She was sweating and shaking when she woke up, and her heart pounded like hooves on stone. Strange charcoal grey symbols had bloomed on her forearms, like bruises in the shapes of letters she didn’t know. They faded slowly, leaving a tingling under her skin.

A message had been scrawled in chalk across the pavement outside the post office. To keep the clock, one must be given. Underneath was a child’s drawing showing a stick figure inside a spiral.

#

Imani sat in the church. The stained glass had shattered and there was now a broken clock face where the altar had once stood, its hands splayed like limbs. A dead bird lay in the pulpit, its eyes wide and wings twitching. The pews around her whispered and it sounded like teeth chattering, bone against bone.

The air tore open and it stepped from the wound, unfurling. It had the shape of hourglass dust and sinew, a thousand clocks ticking in its chest. Its voice came from everywhere and nowhere. ‘Two doors. Choose.’

A door in her mind swung open to show a void filled with drifting clocks and fading stars. ‘Stay. Become the keeper. Shed your skin, your voice, your self. You will never move forward again, but time will.’

The other showed her walking down a winding road, her face serene. ‘Leave. Forget. Let this place rot. Nobody will remember the price. Not even you.’

Imani thought of her past. She remembered surgeries, becoming, blood, names she had buried and ones she had chosen. She thought about being told there were only two doors. She had never accepted that.

‘I’ll take the role,’ she said. ‘But not the shape.’ The entity stilled. ‘I won’t keep time. I’ll weave it. Let it stretch, knot, loop, breathe.’ As she spoke, the shattered clock began to pulse. The chattering teeth sang. The bird lifted its head and screamed in a new voice that sounded like hers and like nobody at all.

#

The village breathed again. Pipes groaned and radios crackled with songs from long-dead stations. The villagers woke screaming, their mouths open too wide and eyes wild with dreams they hadn’t chosen. Some sobbed on their knees in the streets, clutching themselves as if trying to confirm they had weight in the world. A few never woke up at all, remaining still as wax figures with their minds lost somewhere between ticks.

Time resumed, but not as it had been. Clocks struck thirteen, and the moon rose at noon. Spring bled into autumn in the space of a breath. Snow only fell on Wednesdays. People forgot their birthdays and remembered the death dates of people who hadn’t died yet. A child aged ten years in ten seconds and then back again.

Imani was gone. Something that had been Imani walked in the shadows of all worlds, behind the reflections in every window. It moved through timelines and bent them out of shape, breaking what had been made and then remaking what had been broken in a new form. Time no longer ticked, it threaded, and nothing would ever be the same.