Arthur and his friends break into the old high school and uncover a clock that tears them out of their own time and drops them into danger.
The sky hung over the abandoned high school like a sheet of spilled ink. Arthur stood outside the fence and stared at the dark windows, feeling that familiar pull in his chest, the one that had dragged him back here more than once. Tonight he wasn’t alone. Lena, Igor, and Zuza were with him, and that made the place feel even stranger, as if the building itself had been waiting for all four of them.
They slipped through a broken window and landed in a corridor that smelled of dust, wet concrete, and something older. Their torch beams skimmed over cracked tiles and peeling walls, catching on half-collapsed lockers and graffiti faded to ghosts. No one spoke above a whisper. Even Igor, usually the first to joke when things got tense, moved carefully.
Lena found the staircase to the basement. It was half hidden behind a door that barely clung to its hinges, and the steps below were slick with damp. At the bottom sat a cast-iron box, black with rust, webbed over with dust as if no hand had touched it in years.
Igor knelt and flipped the lid open.
Inside was a clock.
It was smaller than Arthur expected, but wrong in a way he felt before he understood it. The glass was clear, the metal frame fine and cold-looking, yet the hands moved backwards, steady and precise. Instead of numbers, symbols circled the face in a ring Arthur didn’t recognise. Not decoration. Not any language he knew.
Zuza leaned in. "It looks like something from a sci-fi film."
She reached out.
The clock lit up.
A blue glow swelled beneath the glass, bright enough to throw hard shadows across their faces. A low hum filled the basement, deep and vibrating, until Arthur could feel it in his teeth. The air warmed at once, sharp and electric, like the moment before a storm breaks. Lena caught his eye. Her fear and curiosity looked exactly the same.
The floor lurched.
Arthur grabbed for the wall, but the basement, the stairs, the box, all of it seemed to tilt away from him. The humming turned into a crackling rush. Light burst across the room, white-blue and blinding, and the world snapped apart.
When it came back, the heat hit him first.
He blinked against the sun and found himself standing in the middle of a packed market, shoulder to shoulder with strangers in rough cloth, leather belts, and colours that looked burned by the light. Stalls crowded every side of the square. Somewhere nearby, drums were beating hard enough to shake the air. Voices rose and fell in a language none of them understood.
Arthur turned in a slow circle, his mouth dry.
Above the entrance to a nearby inn hung a carved lion crest, weathered and chipped but still proud. Lena stared at it as if it might answer the question forming on all their faces.
"Was it... medieval?" she whispered.
No one had time to reply.
A line of armed men had noticed them.
They were pushing through the crowd with purpose, eyes fixed on the four of them as if they already knew they did not belong there. Zuza’s fingers tightened around the clock. The blue light beneath the glass flared brighter, and the hum rose again, urgent now, as if the thing in her hands had just decided where to send them next.