The Clock That Ticked Backwards

The old grandfather clock had been in the attic for over a hundred years, wrapped in a moldy tarp and forgotten by every generation that lived in the Carrington house. It didn’t make a sound—not a tick, not a chime. It just stood there like a silent sentinel guarding something it never wanted to share.

Until the day Nathan Carrington turned sixteen.

That summer, Nathan’s father decided it was time to clean out the attic. "It's a furnace up there, but there's something valuable I want to show you," he said. They climbed the creaking stairs, brushing past dust webs and ancient boxes. In the corner, hidden beneath a mildew-stained sheet, stood the clock.

“What is it?” Nathan asked, brushing cobwebs off the carved wood.

His father hesitated. “It’s been in our family for generations. It belonged to your great-great-grandfather. But… something about it gives me the creeps.”

That should’ve been the end of it. They should have left it there, in silence and shadow. But Nathan was curious. He was drawn to the antique piece—the way it seemed almost alive beneath the grime. That night, while everyone was asleep, he returned to the attic.

He lifted the tarp. The clock’s face stared back at him. Its glass was cracked, and the numbers were faintly reversed. Odd. But the moment his hand brushed the pendulum, something clicked. The gears inside groaned to life. And then it began to tick.

Tick… tick… tick…

But backwards.

Nathan frowned. The second hand moved counterclockwise, slowly but purposefully, like it was undoing something. And then he heard the whisper.

“Welcome back…”

He spun around. No one. Just stacked furniture and shadows. He laughed it off—probably a draft or his imagination.

But that night, he dreamed of the clock.

In the dream, he stood in front of it, just like earlier. But this time, the room behind him decomposed in reverse—mildew receded, cobwebs vanished, paint reappeared on walls. A woman stood in the corner, back turned, whispering to the clock in a strange, broken language. When she turned around, her face was hollowed out, skin sucked into the bones, eyes black as ink.

Nathan woke up choking.

Over the next few days, things changed. Time felt… strange. He would look at his phone and see the time jump backward by minutes. He missed a bus that had already passed, even though he was ten minutes early. His reflection in the mirror would sometimes move just a second behind him, like it wasn’t syncing properly.

Then, on the third night, his mother screamed.

Nathan raced down the stairs. She was pointing at the hallway mirror. “I—I saw someone! Someone standing behind me!” But there was no one.

His father dismissed it as stress. Nathan knew better.

The clock kept ticking.

Backwards.

He started researching it in secret. The Carrington Clock had a story. Buried deep in old town records, Nathan found whispers of a craftsman in the late 1800s named Elias Carrington, who had built it during a nervous breakdown after the death of his wife. He believed that if he could reverse time—just enough—he could bring her back.

But when he succeeded in making the clock tick backwards, something else came through.

His journal, one of the few artifacts left, ended with a single line written in shaking script:

"The past is not a memory—it is a prison with open doors."

Nathan made a decision. He would destroy the clock.

He brought a hammer up to the attic, each step heavier than the last. The air was ice-cold. The clock was already waiting, its ticking now faster. As he approached, the second hand snapped, flying off and embedding in the wood near his foot.

The pendulum swung rapidly. Nathan lifted the hammer.

“Please,” a voice whispered behind him. “One more tick…”

He turned and came face to face with the woman from his dream. Sunken cheeks, void-black eyes, lips stitched in time’s thread. She raised a finger and touched the clock.

Suddenly, the attic reversed. Dust fled. The room lit up with lanterns instead of bulbs. Nathan wasn’t Nathan anymore. He was Elias. His hands were aged, his thoughts fractured.

“No,” he gasped. “I fixed this. I brought her back.”

“No,” the woman whispered. “You brought us all back.”

Behind her, others stepped from the shadows. Dozens. Hundreds. Things that never should have been remembered. Time was unspooling, leaking backwards, and now he had restarted it.

Nathan screamed.

When the Carrington house was sold six months later, the real estate agent apologized for the condition of the attic. Everything was pristine except for one thing: a shattered clock lying in the center of the floor.

The hands were gone. The face was cracked.

But the strangest thing?

Every now and then, it ticks.

Backwards.