It wasn't a movie. It was a fixed-angle shot of a windowless room filled with old-fashioned clocks. Hundreds of them. Grandfather clocks, tiny cuckoos, and digital alarms. They weren’t synced; the room was a chaotic battlefield of ticking.

He looked at the corner of his laptop screen. It was today’s date. The time was 1:23 PM.

Heart hammering, Elias looked at the timestamp of the file creation: .

The media player opened to a black screen. For the first ten minutes, there was only the sound of a rhythmic, mechanical hum—like a server room or a life-support system. Then, the video flickered to life.

The figure held up a piece of paper. It had one sentence written in messy, frantic ink:

On the screen, the hand in the video reached out and began to turn the hands of the largest clock forward. As the digital counter on the video player hit 20:00, a loud, physical thud echoed from his front door.

The person holding the camera was wearing the exact same sweater Elias was wearing right now—a rare, thrifted wool knit with a snag on the left cuff. Behind the photographer, in the reflection, was the very room Elias was sitting in. But the room in the video was empty of furniture, stripped to the floorboards.