The night the clock started ticking, I was at my desk, slaving away at my philosophy essay. 

I was so absorbed in my work that I didn’t exactly notice it at first. It was only when I looked out into the abyss of night beyond my open window that I realised that a clock was ticking somewhere in the darkness. Every second, a tick, tick; it couldn’t be anything else. How odd, I thought. There certainly wasn’t a clock anywhere in the garden. The neighbours’ houses were too far away for me to be hearing the ticking of their clock so clearly. Puzzled, I turned back to my essay, as the deadline was too pressing for me to ponder a phantom clock. Perhaps I was simply hallucinating from lack of sleep and an overdependence on caffeine. 

But over the next few nights, the ticking persisted whenever my window was open in the early hours of the morning. The second time I noticed it was when I was half asleep, my pen limp in my hand, my head drooping. I was aware of the room around me, whilst slipping into dreams of running away from my desk, from my essays, from the routine exhaustion. I had just gained a dreamy sense of freedom, like my soul was floating through clouds, when the ticking invaded my mind yet again and brought me back to the real world; the one with inky paper on my desk, of cramps in my hands, of heavy eyes and bitter coffee. 

Annoyed, I slammed my window shut and went to bed, too tired to go outside and search for the damned thing. My dreams that night were nightmares. In each one, I searched for the clock in all sorts of unlikely places, turning over stones until my hands were raw and bleeding, tearing bark off trees, uprooting flower bed after flower bed and plunging my hands into soil filled with spiders and centipedes, the ticking ever louder, but the clock only ever turned up right at the end, when something seemed to snatch my soul from my body. And, then there would be a hyperrealistic scene of me sitting at my desk, scrawling out the same sentence over and over, yet I could never read what it was. I awoke unrested, glaring out at the dewy garden and the clock that, according to my subconscious, resided somewhere within. 

The next night, as I studied, I was reluctant to open the window. But the air was so stifling that I slid it open begrudgingly. The clock came soon, ticking somewhere in the dark, and it annoyed me so much that I decided to see if I could find it. I went downstairs to the back door and stepped onto the damp lawn, branches of trees ghostly white in the moonlight hanging over my head. The ticking persisted but was fainter and fainter. I started in one direction, hoping that the ticking was getting louder, but just as soon as the volume seemed to have peaked, it died down, and I was left shoving aside the scraggly branches of bushes, searching in vain for the source. It started again, seemingly from near the dry bird bath ten metres away, but though I hurried, kicking away the leaf litter around the base, expecting to stub my toe on it, it was nowhere to be found. The ticking died down, and though I listened hard in the silent night, I heard nothing yet again. 

Until I heard something under the oak tree nearby, and hurrying over quickly, far too quickly, I slammed my head into a low-hanging branch and was knocked unconscious. 

It took some time until I came around. In some ways, it felt like the best sleep I’d had in a long time, but it still felt unnerving, as if my consciousness was separated from the rest of me. I cannot remember what was going through my mind, yet I felt as if something was happening. The first thing I thought of when I came to in the lounge room, my concerned mother leaning over my head, was that the essay I had been hurrying to finish last night was half-done at best and that unless I finished it in this very hour, I would certainly fail to meet the deadline for it. I tried to sit up to go upstairs and finish, but I was forced to stay lying on the lounge and rest. I became furious with my mother, tears of frustration and desperation streaming down my face as I thought of my impending doom. 

The following weeks were an onslaught of deadlines. I didn’t dare open my window as I worked for fear of hearing the clock again. My mother had laughed when I told her how I managed to knock myself unconscious and then told me sternly that I should be getting more sleep to stop hallucinating. She was right, of course, and I did try. But the fear of the ticking remained and made me feel on edge whenever I worked at my desk or walked through the garden. 

I heard the clock again after sleeping for half the day. It ticked in my dreams, as usual. Even keeping my window closed didn’t seem to rid me of it. It was late in the evening, and my mother had just retired for the night, but I decided to get a few more things done for a looming application deadline before I, too, went to bed and tried to be well-rested. I did not intend to let the clock into my abode. It just so happened that a wasp came into my room; there was a nest under the eaves that had not yet been dealt with, and I assumed it had entered the house during the day and was thrown out of its natural rhythm by the lights. I was not terribly enthusiastic about sharing a room with such a vile creature, so I hurriedly opened my window as wide as it could go and then, with a broom, carefully tried to nudge the wasp towards it. When it finally complied and flew out into the night, I breathed a sigh of relief before hearing, in the newfound silence free of buzzing and my terrified squeals, the ticking, once again. 

I froze, horrified. I was well rested, so I surely couldn’t be hallucinating. I wondered about waking up my mother to prove to her that I was not imagining things, but recalling the scornful look on her face when I told her about my phantom clock, I was put off the idea. I stood still for a few moments more, deciding what to do, before resolving to have another look outside for the wretched thing. I would be calm this time, collected and in charge. I first decided to search around the house a bit, in case I’d been hearing one of our own clocks through two open windows. But as I went around and listened to each of them, the resonance of the ticking was distinctly different. The grandfather clock was deep, the kitchen clock almost silent, and I could not find any unused alarm clocks in drawers or cupboards that might be to blame. So, with a sigh, I went into the garden again. Sure enough, I could hear the clock; its ticking high-pitched and light, almost playful or teasing. 

I struggled to remain calm, idly pushing aside leaves with my foot and pushing aside branches with one finger until, eventually, the turmoil in my head got to me, and I kicked a mound of dirt in frustration. From then on, I searched savagely for this cursed clock, my hands getting scratched and bloody as I shoved aside undergrowth and tore up stones. The ticking persisted, persisted, persisted. 

When I finally found the clock, it had just stopped ticking. Both hands were stuck on 12, completed, done. That was when I realised I had failed to accomplish this deadline — the only deadline that mattered. The other ones were irrelevant and I should have known, should have broken away from being so consumed by them before I became cursed forever to be a slave to them. Now I had crossed a line of no return, and any spirit I may have had left surely died. 

So, I went back inside, washed my hands, and sat down to work on my philosophy essay.