Speaker 1: Come on, I muttered, tapping the steering wheel nervously. I
couldn't miss this. This deal was too important. My boss
had claimed this was a make or break for my employment.
If I was late to this meeting, I was doomed.
I pulled out the pocket watch that had been gifted
to me just this morning, three fifteen p m. The
meeting was supposed to start in fifteen minutes, and I
was an entire thirty minutes away. Traffic had been at
a standstill for what felt like an eternity. The cars
in front of me hadn't so much as budged in
the last ten minutes. I gripped the pocket watch tightly,
subconsciously praying that I'd make it to this meeting. I
put the watch back in my pocket and pulled out
my phone, checking the GPS for an alternate route just
in case. The screen flickered oddly, then refreshed with a
new found route, a series of some back streets that
looked like they cut through the city and would get
me there just on time. It looked tight, but it
was my only chance by a long shot. However, based
on the city's layout, it still seemed impossible to make
on time myy eyed the gridlock ahead of me, my
stomach clenched with frustration. I had to take the risk.
I turned off the highway, and as soon as I did,
the drivers behind me started honking their horns angrily. Honestly,
I felt a little stupid, hoping that making it on
time was possible. I drove down the suggested exit and
saw that I was the only one doing so. The
exit led me towards a section of the city I
had never been to. I went through a narrow street
lined with old brick buildings, looking much older than the
modern infrastructure that made up most of the city. The
road was oddly quiet. It was the middle of the day,
and as far as I was aware, this part of
town wasn't known for being busy. I was making good time,
but I couldn't get the nagging question of why no
other drivers were taking this route. The streets around me
were entirely desolate. The road ahead of me looked endless,
an empty street littered with trash and moss. It looked
entirely abandoned. It felt like I was all alone. The
five minutes I drove felt excruciating, every second passing making
me more and more nervous. My phone buzzed something about
losing the GPS signal. I looked down, frowning. The blue
dot was frozen on the map. I smacked my phone
in a cartoonish attempt to make it work again, and
glenns that the buildings at either side of me had
the road been getting narrower. These back streets were like
a maze, one narrow alley stretching for miles, and branching
paths that looked almost too tight for even a person
to squeeze through, let alone a car. I drove a
little farther until I realized that my suspicion was correct.
The road was getting narrower, so narrow that it was
getting almost too tight for my car. I cursed under
my breath. The alley continued, stretching into the distance between towering,
dirty brown and gray buildings. I still couldn't see where
they ended. The pure vastness of this abandoned section of
the town made me wonder how I'd never heard of
it before. At this point, I had already given up
and making it to the meeting in time. The alley
was getting so narrow that I could hear a slight
graping noise as my wing mirror clashed with the rough
surface of the buildings to my sides. I reversed ever
so slightly, just enough to be able to get out
of the car and planned on surveying the road ahead
of me. I turned the engine off, let out a
heavy sigh, and stepped out of my car. The moment
my shoes hid the ground below me, I regretted it.
The entire alley felt wrong. The air was heavy and moist.
It smelt like rust, mildew, and something I couldn't recognize.
The light above me seemed to dim ever so slightly.
There were no clouds in the sky, just the suffocating
weight of the buildings crowding in on me on either side.
The road ahead did indeed get significantly narrower, so I
trudged forward. My car clearly could not pass any further,
so I planned on finding the nearest business or anything helpful.
I pulled my phone out to try to check the signal. Nothing.
My phone was useless and the GPS app was still
in the exact location where it had lost service. I
stuffed it back in my pocket and decided to keep walking.
I could now see more details of the roads themselves.
The walls of the buildings were stained with aged graffiti,
and trash piled up in every corner. The strange thing
was that all the packaging was faded, as if it
had been there for quite some time. All the windows
were either boarded up or cracked. Rats scurried between the
heaps of trash, and the air took in an oppressive
smell of decay, increasing in intensity the further I walked.
Each footstep I made created a sickening echo through the streets.
The weight of my situation was finally sinking in. I
was going to lose my job, which made every single
step I took heavier than the last. I would be
lying if I said I wasn't already getting concerned. The
frustration of the roadblock was fading away, and he was
getting replaced with my fear for my future. This was
my best paying job ever, and I was unsure where
to go. I pulled the old pocket watch out again,
the one my wife Alexis had given me for good luck.
She told me with a smile. It had been her grandfather's.
She claimed her family heirloom of swords. Her grandfather told
us stories of it, granting wishes and attributing it to
his success in life, passed down through generations for god
knows how long, and she had insisted that I'd take
it with me to this meeting. She said her father
gave it to her after he heard his leg in
an accident, saying he can't run like he used to before,
which she always thought was an odd reason, maybe an
inside joke. I left it off initially and pocketed it,
mostly out of respect. I didn't have much belief in
things like wishes. I mean, just a few moments prior
I had wished to arrive at the meeting, and now
here I was. But now I felt the weight of
the watch in my hand, a little heavier than I
remember it being. I flipped the watch open. Its face
cracked and the hands were frozen. Three twenty six p m.
It had been working earlier, I was sure of it.
With a heavy sigh, I slipped the watch back into
my pocket and continued walking. I glanced back and noticed
that my car was now entirely out of sight. Given
the road straight nature, that was impossible. I could only
imagine that the road had a slight curve to it,
so slight that it was barely noticeable on foot. I
turned around and started walking back the way I came,
determined to check if my suspicions were correct. What I
did not expect was that I would end up walking
for what felt like another while with no car in sight.
Then I came to a fork in the road. The
alley twisted into two paths. I was sure I hadn't
seen a split in the road on my journey. I
might have been too lost in my own thoughts about
how screwed I was now that I wasn't making it
to the meeting, so I assumed I just walked forward
without looking at my surroundings. I went left, choosing what
I felt was right and hoped I was correct. As
I continued walking, my sense of time was getting distorted,
so it wasn't sure how long I walked. The alley
wasn't as straight as I thought it was looking in
the distance. It winded and curved without any real sense
of direction. The buildings looked decrepid, dirty walls, cracked pavement.
All the buildings blended together so much that I started
to feel like I was walking in circles. Yeah, I
kept going, telling myself the road would lead somewhere. Eventually
I glanced over at the countless buildings that surrounded me.
I hadn't seen any sign or markings of a business,
not even a restaurant or a bar. The buildings looked
entirely deserted, and if they did, for some reason, house someone,
I did not want to take my chances and the
kind of company they'd hold. I continued on, but the
road just stretched, the shadows grew darker, and the alley
ever narrower. A while longer, I stopped to catch my breath.
I wasn't the most athletic person, but surely I covered
quite some distance during this time. This wasn't right at all.
Nothing was by now. I should have made it to
my car, or at this point, to the other side
of the damned city. At least the sun should have
been high up in the sky, But instead it was
getting darker, as if twilight came early. The buildings overhead
pressed ever so slightly closer. It felt like I was
in a dream, another world, one that was shrinking and
closing in around me. I rechecked my phone out of desperation,
dead I couldn't even make a call. I took a
deep breath in an attempt to keep calm. I had
gotten near of my mine, my own accord, so there
had to be a way out. I'd crossed so much
distance that this couldn't just be an abandoned street or block.
It felt like I was in an abandoned city that
geologically shouldn't exist. I knew roughly where I was turning
off when I took that exit. This place shouldn't be here.
I decided to make the Ardus trip to retrace my steps.
I planned to go back to the first fork in
the road and turn right this time, and hope it
led me to my car. I begrudgingly headed back the
way I came, and again the path was not the same.
I was sure there had been no other forks or
turns on the main road I was on, But instead
of the curving alley I'd walked so long gone, there
were now three different directions ahead of me, none of
which wh looked even remotely familiar. My heart started raising.
I turned in a slow circle as panic set in.
I picked a direction at random and started walking faster,
almost running. My shoes hid the concrete with a sound
that reverberated all around me. But the alley stretched on
longer than before. Each step I made seemed to make
my surroundings more clauslophobic, and everything twisted and turned in
ways that made no sense. I had no idea how
long I moved like this, minutes, maybe hours. My legs
ached and my throat was dry. I stopped checking my
watch on my phone. The time was always frozen at
three twenty six. Anyway, my head was pounding, and a
sense of dread gnawed at me from the inside. The
dark alley around me felt alive. That is the only
way I can possibly describe it. The walls seemed to
shift on I wasn't looking. The turns multiplied and appeared
more frequently. The road was now diverging in paths. Unlike before,
I no longer had a straight and narrow road ahead
of me, but a path that criss crossed and intersected
within itself, leading me deeper and deeper into whatever I
had been led toward. I could feel it in the air,
a primal instinct. This wasn't just some maze of back streets.
I started jogging, then running. I figured I couldn't go
on forever and wanted to be out as soon as possible.
But the quicker I moved, the more disoriented I became.
The alley bent in such strange ways that it sent
me spiraling. I tumbled to the ground as everything became
perfectly quiet, devoid of my echoing footsteps. I kept telling
myself I should have been now by now, but every
turn led me to a dead end or another unfamiliar
stretch of streets. My breath became ragged, quick gasps, and
I had to stop for a moment. I stood up
and pressed my hands to my knees in an attempt
to recompose. That's when I heard it, the faintest of
sounds somewhere behind me, a soft shuffle amidst the silence.
I stood up straight, and my heart thrumbed in my chest.
I looked behind me. There was nothing but an empty path.
My mind raised, but then it came again, from somewhere closer.
This time I worked out that the sound had to
be coming from the turn ahead of me. Deep down,
I hope some other person had gotten lost there too,
possibly led astray by their GPS, and was now in
the same situation I was in. I know it sounds
malicious to wish someone into my dire circumstance, but at
least it meant I wouldn't be alone in this I
slowly made my way forward, hoping not to scare whoever
was approaching. God knows I had hated if someone sped
towards me or riddled with anxiety from this place. The
shuffling persisted, undeterred by my approach. It sounded like whoever
was around the corner was so exhausted that they were
dragging their feet on the ground. I called out to them,
telling them that I was friendly and asking if they
were also lost like me, and that we should look
for a way out together. I received no response. In fact,
as soon as I spoke, the sound of shufflings ceased entirely.
They must have been hesitant, understandably so, so I hoped
that approaching in a calm manner would settle them. So
I gently neared the turn. Just as I was about
to reach the corner, they seemed to have beaten me
to it, for what came round spiked my adrenaline so
hard that I span in the spot and sprinted away
so fast I thought I was leaving burn marks on
the floor. All I saw was its hand, a gaunt,
elongated for simile of a human hand. The proportions exaggerated
in away that told me that whatever was about to
turn the corner was dangerous. Just seeing the hand was
enough for a primal part of my brain to tell
me a predator was about to turn the corner, and
I was its natural prey. The echoing of my footsteps
was no longer the only noise in this decrepit place.
The air was thick and heavy, as if I were
running through water. I could hear the shuffling behind me
faster and irrationally persistent. I didn't dare look back. I
just ran. My lungs burned and my legs screamed in protest.
Each turn I made, the shuffling behind me stayed ever close.
The echoing surroundings made it hard to determine how close
it was, which pushed me to keep up a pace
that was too much for me. I knew I would
slow soon, but I forced myself to delay that as
much as my body would allow. I took turns at random,
having no time to deduce her choice and knowing that
the alleys layout had no logic, But somehow I still
managed to make the wrong choice. I took a blind
turn and hit a dead end. The light from the
gaps between the buildings highlighted my doom. I heard the
shuffling behind me near the turn. It was too close
to back track. In a matter of seconds it would
be upon me, and even thinking about what that meant
was painful enough. I ran to one of the gaps
between the buildings. I had stuck to the streets and
the lovecraftying logic, so God knows what squeezing between the
buildings would lead to. And squeeze it was. I doubted
I could even fit in, but I pushed myself in
and force my way through. The shuffling went straight for
the gap, but luckily it had the same issue as me,
and it slid into the gap to shuffle towards me.
The gap narrowed the further I got in. I moved
my head, but soon had to commit to a direction.
A wash of more pid curiosity came over me, and
I took a quick glimpse back. That was enough for
me to keep my head looking forward for the remainder
of the way. It had all the limbs of a human,
but the proportions were all wrong. Its arms were almost
the entire length of its height, which must have been
nearly seven foot tall. Despite being further back, its closest
arm reached out towards me, not helping it move, just
hovering in my direction, its fingers twitching like it was
ready to grab me the moment I was within range.
Its other hand dragged on the floor behind it, creating
a familiar shuffling sound. Its skin looked like it had
a rough texture and was pale in color. It sounded
abrasive on the walls pressing on us, resistant to any
of the pointy defects of the cheap bricks that made
up these buildings. A luxury, I did not have even
the smallest bumps in the walls dug into me, cutting
into my suit and sometimes my skin. But I could
not dwell on the mind panes when a major threat
was slowly closing in on me. The pursuit continued. As
I finally wiggled my way to the other side. I
had to get back to safety, but I was completely
and utterly lost. Using the gaps of the buildings was
a new idea, so I tried to keep up that
creative pattern. I had not tried entering any of the
buildings yet. I boked it for the building nearest to
me and attempted to force the door open. I could
hear the rabid thing behind me squeezing itself between the
same path I had just come from, putting solid concrete
between us. Sounded like a bastion of safety, but the
door refused the budge. The humanoid figure finally exited the
tight space with a sickening pop. Adrenaline kicked back in,
and I was already in a full sprint. Above my
thumping footsteps and the shuffling in pursuit, I realized there
was another sound, a ticking sound. It was faint, barely audible,
but it was there, arrhythmic, soft ticking. I yanked the
watch once more and stared at the cracked face. The
clock hands were moving in a strange way. It read
two eleven, all hands pointing in the same direction. I
turned the watch, thinking it might have been broken in
the tight squeeze, and the hands all turned in unison.
It wasn't telling me the time. It was telling me
a direction akin to that of a compass. I continued running,
and the watch adjusted as I made my movements. It
was guiding me, trying to tell me something As I
ran in a single direction, the ticking of the watch
started getting more frantic, and the sound of the shuffling
returned to reach a crescendo. I hurried my pace with
a last of my strength, but was no longer running blindly.
I let the soft, steady rhythm guide me through the
maze of the alleyways, a sick game of hot and cold.
The creature was still behind me, its shuffling echoed in
the darkness, but I didn't stop. I couldn't. Eventually I
saw it, a faint red car in the distance, my car.
It was still parked in the same spot where I
had left it, as if nothing had happened. The moment
I saw it, the pocket watch's rhythmic ticks turned wild,
and the creature's pace quickened all over. The senses seemed
to flee my mind, and my sole focus was on
running as fast as I could. I reached the car,
fumbling with the keys with shaking hands. The thing was
so close now that I could almost feel its damp
breath on the back of my neck. I shoved the
key to the lock, through the door open and chumped inside.
I slammed the door shut as the creature reached me.
The vehicle shook as the beast collided with it, and
I closed my eyes in an attempt to at least
grant myself the privilege of not looking at that thing again.
For a moment, everything went perfectly silent. I sat there
in disbelief, my breathing still rapid from the long sprint
I had to maintain. The heavy breathing must have been
too much for me, or the panic finally set in
because I passed out. When I woke up, I was
parked in my spot at the office building's parking space.
I checked my phone out of habit and saw the
time three twenty eight p m. Two minutes before my meeting.
Seeing I was on time for the meeting overtook the
shock of remembering my phone had died. I cried to
my posture. As I raised myself up, I didn't waste
any time. I pushed the car door open and headed
towards the meeting room. I still don't quite know what
happened or how I got out, but I knew the
watch was connected to it. I distinctly remember holding it
while stuck in traffic and wishing I could make it
to the meeting in time, and lo and behold, I did.
I've been back on the same freeway I was stuck
on before the meeting, and there isn't an exit where
I remembered turning off the road. I pulled over in
a lay by, and no matter how many times I checked,
there was no alternative roots from that spot. It seemed
my wish had come true, as my grandfather in law
had told my wife, but it came at the cost
of this chase. And now it finally made sense why
it was passed unto her when her father hurt his
leg