Mark sat in a leather chair in the security office, with four screens in front of him emitting a faint blue glow. As the sole night-shift security guard in this old office building, he was all too familiar with this deathly silence.
At 3:00 a.m., the entire building was empty except for Mark and “Chronos Antiques” on the 14th floor. It was a shop that catered exclusively to high-end clients, its display windows filled with all manner of intricate antique clocks and watches.
The fog was thick that night, and out of boredom, Mark switched to the 14th-floor surveillance feed. On the screen, the interior of the antique shop was pitch black, illuminated only by the faint red glow of the emergency exit lights.
Suddenly, the screen flickered.
Mark furrowed his brow and leaned forward. The feed returned to normal, but he keenly sensed something was off. He quickly dragged the progress bar to replay the footage from those few seconds.
At 03:14:00, the image showed a brief burst of static, followed immediately by a jump to 03:17:00.
An entire three minutes were missing.
“Damn it, is it the aging wiring again?” ” Mark muttered. But he knew full well that the server had just had its hard drive replaced—such a basic malfunction was impossible. Unless, of course, someone had tampered with it.
A professional instinct urged him to grab his walkie-talkie, but he hesitated. Reporting it would ruin the peace of the night, and security in this building had been excellent lately, with no record of theft. He decided to go check the 14th floor himself first.
The elevator stopped on the 14th floor, and the moment the doors opened, a musty, old-wood scent hit him.
The glass doors of the antique shop were locked tight. Through the glass, Mark could see that everything inside was in perfect order. The expensive grandfather clocks and table clocks stood quietly in their places, as if time had frozen here.
He pulled out his master key and gently unlocked the side door.
The shop was eerily quiet. Mark turned on his flashlight, and the beam swept across the intricate gears and dials. There were no footprints, no signs of disturbance—even the dust in the air seemed unnervingly still.
Everything was so normal it made his heart race.
Mark walked over to the massive brass grandfather clock in the center of the shop. It was the store’s crown jewel, said to have come from 19th-century Vienna. Out of habit, he leaned in to check the time.
The clock’s hands pointed to 3:17 a.m.
Mark instinctively raised his wrist and glanced at his digital watch.
3:17.
To the minute and second.
He let out a sigh of relief and gave a self-deprecating smile: “Looks like I really was overthinking it—the surveillance camera was just down for a few minutes.”
He turned to leave, and the beam of his flashlight inadvertently swept across the wall behind the clock. Hanging there was a faded oil painting depicting Cronus from Greek mythology devouring his own children.
Just as the beam of light swept across the edge of the oil painting, Mark froze.
He remembered clearly that during his patrol last week, he had taken a close look at this painting; the frame had been tilted slightly to the left because the nail in the wall had come loose.
But now, the frame was straight.
Mark’s heart gave a sudden jolt. He quickened his pace toward the painting and reached out to touch the edge of the frame. A faint warmth spread through his fingertips—the lingering heat from metal friction.
Someone had moved this painting.
He spun around to look at the massive brass grandfather clock. The pendulum was swinging rhythmically from side to side, emitting a muffled, steady “tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Tick. Tick.
The sound echoed through the empty store, sounding less like it was marking the passage of time and more like it was masking some other sound.
Mark suddenly realized that perhaps no theft had actually taken place during those missing three minutes. Perhaps someone had simply been hiding inside that massive grandfather clock, holding their breath and waiting silently for him to patrol by.
And now, that person was gone.
Or…
Mark slowly lowered his head and looked into the crack at the base of the clock. There, a pair of eyes was staring intently at him through the gap in the carved wooden panels.
There was no fear in those eyes, only a mocking glee at watching its prey fall into the trap.
Mark froze in place; his flashlight clattered to the floor with a “clunk,” its beam rolling erratically across the floor before finally settling on the clock’s pendulum.
The pendulum continued to swing, once, then again.
Mark suddenly grasped a logic that sent a chill down his spine: if three minutes had been deleted from the surveillance footage, then as far as the system was concerned, those three minutes did not exist.
In other words, anything that happened during those three minutes—legally and logically—had “never happened.”
If that person had killed him during those three minutes, then hidden the body inside the clock, and set the time back to the correct position…
Then, when people discovered he was missing tomorrow morning, the surveillance footage would prove: everything was normal last night, and he had never set foot in this room.
“Tick.”
The clock struck once.
Mark wanted to run, but he found his legs as heavy as if they were filled with lead. He looked down and saw that, at some point, a thin, transparent fishing line had been wrapped around his ankle, extending all the way into the dark depths of the clock.
Those missing three minutes weren’t a malfunction.
They were the “installation time” set aside for him.
Mark opened his mouth to scream for help, but before a sound could escape, an icy hand reached out from the shadows of the clock and clamped over his mouth.
The world plunged into darkness, leaving only that endless ticking.
Early the next morning, the police received a report that Mark had failed to show up for work without explanation.
When the police opened the door to the antique shop, the place was deserted. The massive brass grandfather clock was still ticking precisely, keeping perfect time.
However, an observant detective noticed that the clock’s pendulum seemed to swing a bit more heavily than usual, and the sound it made was duller, as if something soft and heavy were wrapped inside it.
As for the oil painting on the wall, it still hung perfectly straight; the figure of Cronos in the painting seemed to be smiling a little more broadly than he had the day before.
