Three friends slip into an abandoned school at night to find the old attic clock that glows on Bartek’s birthday and starts ticking at midnight.
Leaves whispered along the fence as Ola, Bartek, and Nina worked their way through the dark. They were nineteen, all of them, but the abandoned school still made their skin crawl. It had stood empty for years, yet people in town still talked about the attic: about the sound of an old clock that could sometimes be heard after midnight, after every other room had gone silent.
The wind died the moment they slipped through a gap in the wire. Inside, their footsteps cracked against the warped corridor boards and bounced back at them, too loud, too sharp. Ola lifted her torch. The beam slid over peeling paint, a line of broken lockers, and a wall of faded class photos. The children in them stared out with fixed, serious faces, as if they had been caught waiting for something.
"Maybe we should go back," Ola murmured.
Bartek didn’t answer. He was looking up at the ceiling, as if he could already feel the attic above them. For months he had been thinking about the same thing: every year, on the night of his birthday, a yellow light had appeared in one of the upstairs windows of this school. No explanation. No one willing to say what it meant.
They found the staircase at the end of the corridor, narrow and rotten-looking, each step groaning under their weight. The attic air was colder, dense with dust and something else he couldn’t name. At the far end stood the clock.
It was taller than any of them, its dark wooden case nearly lost in shadow. Behind the clouded glass, the hands sat motionless. Bartek reached out. The wood felt colder than stone.
"Do you hear that?" Nina whispered.
At first there was only silence. Then a faint metallic click. Another. Somewhere inside the clock, something had begun to move.
The ticking started slowly, like a heartbeat waking in the dark.
Then, from behind the clock, a voice said, very softly, "My turn..."