The Orrery of Sundering Glass

Time fractured in the middle of the parlor, its innards spilling into the cobbled air in a slow-motion deliquescence. Gears wheezed as they twisted inside out, unspooling moments long since calcified. A skeletal-grinned clock spun its hands backward, carving rifts in the velvet of reality—each tick-tock a heartbeat in a body too vast to name.

The Monkey of Imminence, its brass limbs tangled in the ribbons of unraveling seconds, clutched at the chandelier’s molten wax tendrils, swinging between dimensions with a chortling yawn. Its eyes—two churning marbles of phosphorescent nostalgia—drank in a carnival of misremembered futures: a ballroom of cephalopods, a city sculpted from lilac lightning, a zeppelin tethered to the navel of a giant sleeping beneath the floorboards.

The air thickened, resinous, clotted with amber particulates that refracted the gaslight into oxidized gold and viridescent bruises. Dust, laced with the scent of singed vellum and corroded brass, layered atop the acrid reek of something long pickled in paraffin. The humidity carried a copper tang, the same metallic film left on fingers after handling old coins. The damask wallpaper swelled and contracted, its seams splitting to reveal glimpses of an underlayer that pulsed like vascular tissue.

A phonograph in the corner spun with dry, clicking insistence, its needle etched too deep into the grooves, dragging out a whispering hiss that did not belong to any recorded sound. A lacquered automaton, barely a foot tall, convulsed in arrested motion, its segmented brass spine jerking spasmodically as though some unseen force were trying to correct a mechanical seizure. It had been built to bow but had forgotten how.

At the room’s center, the clock buckled inward, its brass frame inhaling. The numerals along its face shuffled, rearranging into an equation that refused to resolve. At its base, a tangle of plush animals and leather-bound grimoires lay half-submerged in an oozing slick of congealed time. The books trembled whenever the pendulum struck the walls.

Along the periphery, a mural of grotesques peeled itself from the walls, painted figures untangling from the fresco with boneless fluidity. A figure in bishop’s robes, its chromatic, insectoid face gleaming, reached outward, dragging itself from the pigments into three-dimensional form, its mitre dripping liquefied varnish. Further down, a goggled homunculus with eight segmented arms emerged from the curling edges of its own illustration, hands grasping at unseen levers. Their presence warped the light—shadows bending at unnatural angles, lantern glow curdling into an ulcerous ochre.

The floor lay strewn with chimeric remains: rubbery cephalopod limbs fused to porcelain doll torsos, stuffed animals gutted and restitched with wire and calcified lace. Skulls, both human and animal, had been repurposed into makeshift lanterns, filaments of jellyfish-like tendrils pulsing dimly from within the sockets. A rat, no larger than a child’s shoe, dragged a vertebra necklace across the floor, pausing to nibble at an unidentifiable scrap of meat.

Above the fireplace, the mirror refused stability. The silvered glass pulsed like a slow-moving tide, cycling through distortions: first, a reflection where the chandelier wept tallow-white larvae, then another where the parlor had turned inside out, its furnishings inverted like organs beneath wax paper. Through the rippling distortion, a skeletal-faced figure in a yellow hood gestured toward the clock with a gloved hand, though no such figure stood in the room.

The mirror convulsed once, then shattered inward—not in shards but in fluttering, inkblot fragments, each piece unfolding midair into a skittering, six-legged thing that scurried toward the walls, vanishing into the pulsating damask. The rupture left a wound in the silvered glass, its edges curling like burnt paper, revealing a latticed orrery of suspended hourglasses, each filled with something denser than sand, darker than soot, heavier than time.

A mechanical hand, gleaming with brass filigree and veined with something arterial, extended from the void, fingers clicking open and shut as though testing the weight of an unseen burden. From the hearth, ash-thickened shadows oozed up the bricks, forming a new silhouette—a head crowned with taper candles, wax pooling like sweat down an elongated jaw.

The chandelier flared, its bulbs blooming into phosphorescent fungal caps, spore clouds bursting in lazy, luminous plumes. The ceiling, no longer stable, sagged like an overripe fruit, dimpled with the impressions of unseen hands pressing outward. The phonograph let out one final, ragged wheeze before the needle lifted itself free and twisted into a corkscrew of tarnished metal.

The clock’s pendulum stilled. The room exhaled. Every warped distortion collapsed inward at once, folding into a pinpoint of iridescent entropy before blinking out, leaving behind nothing but dust, the scent of spent tallow, and the faintest lingering sound of a hand knocking—slowly, patiently—on the other side of the glass.