Letters from the past
382 Words
James couldn’t sleep.
The room—the one that vanished—still lingered in his mind. The mirrors. Eleanor’s voice. The note.
He returned to the study, hoping the journal might offer more. But instead, he found something new.
A stack of letters.
They were tucked behind a false panel in the desk, bound with a crimson ribbon. The paper was yellowed, the ink faded—but the handwriting was unmistakable.
Eleanor’s.
He opened the first.
> “To whoever finds this: I pray you are not too late. Elias was brilliant, but brilliance without restraint is a kind of madness. He believed he could trap time, preserve love, rewrite loss. But the clock was never meant to be a gift. It was a warning.”
James read through the letters, each one more desperate than the last.
Eleanor had discovered Elias’s secret: the clock wasn’t just a mechanism—it was a conduit. A bridge between memory and reality. Every time it chimed, it pulled something from the past into the present. But not perfectly. Not safely.
> “He built the house around it,” she wrote. “Every room a memory. Every hallway a choice. But the clock grew hungry. It began to take more than time. It took people.”*
James’s hands trembled.
One letter was addressed to him.
But it was dated twenty years ago.
> “James. If you are reading this, then the house has chosen you. You must finish what I couldn’t. Find the pendulum. Destroy it. Only then will the clock stop feeding.”
He looked up.
The clock in the hallway ticked once.
Then twice.
Then stopped.
The silence was deafening.
James stood, heart pounding, and walked to the clock. He opened the glass face.
Inside, the pendulum shimmered—not brass, not metal. Something else. Something alive.
He reached for it.
The house groaned.
Walls shifted.
The study vanished.
He was standing in the foyer again—but it was different. Older. Dustier. And the front door was open.
Outside, the world was frozen.
Snow hung in the air like suspended breath. The trees didn’t sway. The wind didn’t move.
Time had stopped.
James turned back to the cloc
k.
It ticked once more.
And the letters burst into flame.
- Writer
