Time of Death

Liam wakes, an unsettling feeling in his gut. At first, he thinks he’s just going to be sick, that the pork loin he made last night decided it was going to come out the other end. But this wasn’t a food poisoning type of discomfort. Not with the brain fog and the way his body felt like it had been ripped to shreds, his limbs pulled in all directions. He felt like an experiment, like he’d be tempered with. It was then he realizes he isn’t lying on the soft clouds of his king size mattress. The surface below him is hard, cold, unforgiving. Then, the overwhelming sound of a constant ticking. His eyes flutter, and he bolts upright, eyes darting around the room. This isn’t his bedroom. Not his house. The pattering of a water leak is drone out by the ticking sound. The concrete walls are bare gray with the exception of seven clocks lining the walls that surround him. 

It hits him then, slamming into his memory like that old hickory branch his grandmother used to beat him with as a kid. The old asylum he used to work at, left abandoned after being shut down by the government. He was partially to blame, his job at a young twenty-three years old, to experiment on the insane. Dig into their minds. Try to figure out how to fix them. The problem was, most of the time these experiments resulted in death. A long, slow process of torture to the bodies who had broken minds, broken souls, that scientists were desperate to crack into. He’d left that life behind after the asylum was closed down, now forty-seven and working at a law-firm, a far cry from the man he used to be when he haunted this place and its patients.

The ticking of the clocks becomes a nuisance to his thoughts, the hands of all the clocks in disagreement with each other. None of them are in sync. He stumbles to his feet and wonders how he got here when the last thing he remembers is going to bed in the comfort of his own home. His body still aches, his brain still feels like television static. Was he drugged? Did someone come into his home and kidnap him? Is he dreaming? He slaps himself, hard, a grunt of disapproval escaping him when nothing happens. He’s still here, stuck in this room. There’s no windows, no doors. He doesn’t remember this room, doesn’t remember a single place in this building that didn’t have some sort of exit.

His heart rate starts increasing, echoing in his ears as he swallows. There has to be a way out of here. He’s walking around the room now, hands glued to the walls, patting, pulling and feeling at every crevice to find an escape route. The clocks are still ticking. His breathing picks up. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Breathe. Think, he tells himself. For a moment, he feels like he’s going crazy. Takes a step back, closes his eyes for a minute. The clocks remind him he’s still there though, and he opens his eyes to the same prison. His throat burns now, trying to hold back tears of distress as reality sinks in that he’s not leaving this room. 

The clocks all sing in harmony together and he snaps his head in all directions, taking in the time of each one. They’re all on the hour, but different hours. The room darkens, all the lights go out, and when they turn back on, the room changes. There’s a chair in the center of the room now, much like the one he tied patients down to all those years ago. He barely notices the shadow hunched in the corner of the room, slowly rising, staring at him. Some weird, demonic, ghost of a person lingers towards him. In just one blink, she’s got him pinned down onto the chair and he finds the courage to meet his villain’s face. He remembers, now, a patient of his – a fourteen year old named Marie. Admitted to the asylum by her family. He can’t move, paralyzed in this chair as he stares at her wide-eyed, begging for his life only his lips don’t move when he tries to speak.

Fire floods his brain, her hand pressed coldly against his forehead. He feels every thought, every memory, every brain cell, melting away at her touch. His mouth moves, only to let out a piercing scream. And then it’s gone. She’s gone, the pain is gone. He sits up so fast, frantic, that he tumbles from the chair. His eyes searching the room for any sign that she might come back. The clocks have stopped singing, resuming their ticking. He’s trying to think, to dig into the mind of the man he used to be, and jumps to his feet to search the bookshelf and desk that spawned when the chair did. He’s tossing books and old journals of his off the shelf, thumbing through them one by one before they leap over his shoulder, seeking any clues to end whatever the fuck this is. He finally finds a book, finds something highlighted – Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance. Time. The clocks. The way out is the time on the clocks.

For a short moment, he feels a sense of hope, feels one step closer to getting out of here. Until he realizes he has no idea what to even do with the clocks. He racks his brain, his past and why it’s coming back to torment him, and remembers a journal he came across that he’d tossed over his shoulder. He picks one back up and flips through the pages, the ticking in his ear a constant reminder. He finishes, groans. Not the right one. Then, he’s picking up journal after journal, searching for that damn page he’d seen earlier. Time escapes him until he hears the dreaded musical tone of all the clocks syncing at the hour. A glitch in reality and he’s back in the chair, another malicious spirit by his side and filing through a set of tools on a tray that wasn’t there the first time. It’s a man this time – a forty year old who’d lost his mind and been dragged into the asylum by his wife. He picks up a scalpel, turns to face Liam and leans in with a wide grin, his teeth a rotting, black cave in his mouth. Liam yells out as the sharp, silver blade draws a bloody rut across his forehead. The man is laughing now as he squirms against the restraints, on the verge of pleading for a quick death, because nothing could be worse than his head being fileted open. But as quick as it starts, it’s over and the scalpel is falling to the floor. 

He presses his hand to his forehead, heart about to burst right through his chest, and pulls his hand away to see the blood still very much there. He’s got to figure this out, get out of here, before the next vengeful patient shows up in the next hour. His vision is blurring and he slides off the chair, wobbly on his feet, and uses all the energy he has to finish looking through the books. On the third one, he finds the page, a chart of the seven patients who died under his care. Scribbled beside each name was their time of death. He carries the journal over to the first clock, showing 12:08. He looks down at the first patient on the list, with a time of death of 12:35. He takes the clock down, moving the hands until it displays the patient’s time of death, and hangs it back on the wall. Several seconds of just staring at the damn thing, and he’s noticing that the ticking has stopped. The hands are still stuck on 12:35. 

Now he’s going clock to clock, changing them patient by patient. He’s worn out, tired, losing a lot of blood as he goes. His movements are slowing with each clock and his mouth feels like sandpaper. His vision is fading, blackness circling the outer rims of his sight until he collapses onto the floor just as he reaches for the fifth clock. When he wakes with a throbbing head, the clocks he changed are still silent, frozen in time, but the remaining three call out in song. He cries, for the first time, unable to withstand anymore of this constant torture. 

It happens again. He’s back in the chair.

Another patient. Thirty-two year old serial killer sent to them years ago.

Needles prick through his scalp, digging in and making him see a colorful static.

He’s screaming again.

And then it’s over. Again.

He can barely function, can barely think. He’s parched, he’s starving, he needs to get to a hospital before he bleeds out. The dripping of the water leak grabs his attention and he thinks it’s better than nothing, crawling his way over to the puddle forming on the concrete slab. He laps at the liquid like an overly excited dog who’d just come back inside from running around the yard chasing a bird. It takes three tries before he gets back on his feet. He trips over the journal he dropped on the floor. Picks it back up, barely manages to stand again. As he changes the last three clocks on the wall, his tongue starts to burn. It’s acid on his tongue with how quickly the burn increases, eating a hole through his mouth. Blood is dripping into his eyes from his forehead and he keeps taking a moment to wipe it away, taking quick breaths like when you’re trying to cool your mouth after biting into a fresh-out-of-the-microwave Hot Pocket. Everything hurts, everything burns, he feels his stomach turning. He’s on the last clock now, his fingers shaking as he adjusts the hand on the back, and suddenly he’s bending over, retching and emptying the contents of his stomach that come out red and clear, the burning in his mouth even worse now. His vision is worsening, so blurry now he has to squint to get the hand directly onto the six before placing it back up on the wall.

He hears a latch, hears something dragging along the floor, and looks up to see a hidden door now open to him. Natural light shining through into the dark room barely lit by the old lighting on the ceiling. He’s trying to walk, his feet dragging as his legs go numb, and he’s eventually pulled back down to the floor. But he’s determined to get to the door now, finally able to break free of this hell, and using all his arm strength to pull him back towards a normal life. His heart is still beating, still echoing in his ears, but it’s getting slower. His limbs follow suit, moving at the same pace as that thumping organ in his chest. He hears his own wheezing, his own gasping for air as he drags himself towards the light outside the room. Finally breaks through the doorway, his hand touching paper on the ground as he reaches forward. He squints, hard now, because he thinks he might be going blind in one eye. Takes note of how he feels like he’s floating. He can’t really hear his heartbeat anymore. His eyes catch the red lettering on the paper, a yellow symbol and one singular word before he can’t see a damn thing anymore: CYANIDE.