MicroHorror

Do the dark watches of the night tick? Long, stiff hands twitching to a faltering pulse. Impassive cheese-yellow faces marking humanities progress along that narrowing tunnel of inevitability, the passage of time.

Septimus Snaith reaches for the bottle’s soothing coolness and pours molten fire into a grimy cup. Malt whisky marks the passage of time well enough for his purposes; let his idle mind wander where it will.

He picks up the jeweler’s loupe and screws it again into the reddened socket of his left eye. Before him, on a black velvet cloth, a half-hunter watch lies unclothed. Trembling, it awaits his pleasure. Magnified and unmagnified views jostle for Snaith’s attention as he maneuvers the pin-sharp tips of tiny tweezers. Easing blued steel into the beating brass heart of the watch, he slows the balance-wheel’s oscillation by a fraction.

Leaning back, Snaith rubs at his chest, scraping his cheap cotton shirt over sallow, sweating skin. He has heartburn again. Boiling acid surging out between his ribs to scald the veins of his neck and shoulder. He reaches for another bottle. Milk of Magnesia and Scotch: an eclectic mix. As Snaith sucks the chalky cream from the bottle’s ink-blue neck, the clocks around him whirr, creak, groan and then strike. Twelve emphatic beats.

Midnight: the crossing point between one day and the next. Between one world and the next. A moment of infinitesimal length marked by the scuttle of fleshless feet crossing the divide.

An hourglass slams onto the bench between Snaith’s hands, crushing the half-hunter to dust. The skeletal fist that grips the ebony spindle almost hidden within folds of coarse, black cloth.

Then, even as Snaith focuses on it through the smeared glass of the bell, the last grain of sand slips through the pinched neck and falls, forever.