When Tom bought this old watch at an antique shop, the shopkeeper said only one thing: “It stopped at a special time.”
The watch was made of brass, with a slight crack in the crystal, and the hands were frozen at 3:17. Tom didn’t think much of it; he just felt that the watch had an indescribable heaviness, as if he were holding a block of ice.
When he got home, he tried winding it, but no matter how hard he turned the crown, the hands wouldn’t budge. He tossed it onto his nightstand and went to sleep.
In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by an extremely faint “tick-tock.”
He snapped his eyes open. The room was pitch black, with only a faint glimmer of light seeping in through the window. He reached toward the nightstand—the watch was still there, but the hands… were moving.
3:17 a.m. The second hand was creeping forward, tick by tick.
He stared at the watch, his heart racing. It clearly hadn’t been wound—how could it be moving?
Even stranger, with every passing second, the temperature in the room dropped a little. The breath he exhaled began to condense into white mist.
3:18 a.m.
He heard footsteps outside the door.
Very light, very slow, as if the person were shuffling along.
He held his breath, staring intently at the door. The footsteps stopped just outside the door and remained still.
Then, the doorknob began to press down—slowly.
He snatched up the watch, intending to smash it, but just as his fingertips touched the case, he saw a face reflected inside the dial.
It wasn’t his face.
The face was deathly pale, with eyes entirely black and a grin stretching from ear to ear, staring at him unblinkingly from within the dial.
3:19.
The door opened.
He screamed and tried to run, but his body felt as if it were nailed to the spot—he couldn’t move. He could only watch helplessly as a “person” who looked exactly like him walked in, wearing his pajamas and slippers, and stood right in front of him.
“You’re awake?” the thing smiled, its voice sounding exactly like his own.
Then it reached out, gently slipped the watch off his wrist, and put it on its own.
“It’s your turn,” it said.
Tom tried to scream, but no sound came out. He looked down and saw his own hand turning transparent, while the watch was sinking inch by inch into “his” skin.
Finally, he saw himself standing by the bed, holding the watch in his hand, its hands frozen at 3:17.
He looked down at the watch, and in the dial, he saw another face reflected—a face filled with terror and despair, silently pounding against the glass from within.
Suddenly, he understood.
This watch never told the time.
It only swapped people.
