Tick-Tick-Tick (Phase 1)

I found myself watching the clock again. As always, my eyes were glued again. The second hand was spinning around slightly slower than it should have been, I could see that. It was counting off every 1.2 seconds rather than every second, I decided. At any rate, it compelled me. It somehow had the effect of making me feel...well, the clock's atypical imprecision made me feel as if errors were both common and acceptable. It was consoling.

Vera noticed my hypnosis and from out of nowhere, from out of an amorphous cloud of muddled sensory perception, I felt her frail fingers tenuously clutch at my arm. I started and shifted my gaze to meet her own; she looked concerned. I scrunched up my face inquisitively and asked, "Is everything alright, Vera?"

She opened her mouth to formulate a reply, then quickly resealed it and sighed. Her bold grey eyes probed me for a moment or two until she looked away and finally spoke. "Do you know where we are, Griff?"

The odd obviousness of her question vexed me at first. I was about to admonish her for asking such an absurd thing; I was about to give her the short, sharp response of an emphatic "of course." But then I realized something, something terrifying, something terribly true: I did not know where we were. In fact, I hadn't the faintest idea.

"Vera, I -" I tried to come up with something to say, but I couldn't. The sudden shock of not knowing where I was, of looking around and seeing nothing familiar, of frantically searching for a landmark or another recognizable clue or even a reason for me to be right where I stood, disoriented me completely. I simply could not formulate my thoughts into anything so refined and readily understood as words.

"You what, Griff?" Vera's concern was now inlaid with a strange furtive sort of fear. She subconsciously edged herself away from where I stood; perhaps I was disfigured somehow. "What's going on with you?"

I had no idea. I thought, Is something even going on at all? My wordless, thoughtless stupor only allowed me to look up at the clock again, at that ever-so-slightly off-kilter keeper of time. The clock glared back at me in all its horrible detached glory; it regarded me with the serial blankness of some regal eyeless predator, some half-drawn monster toeing its way through the forests of relentlessness...but blackness was sealing itself around me now, it was crawling around the edges of my head again...I was falling...

And then...

I was...

Nothing...