The thin man wound the pocket watch's chain around his finger. The watch dangled and swung twice.
It hung right above my head. The scene looked a little like he was trying to hypnotize me.
But before long, the pocket watch stopped swinging and hung motionless.
Tick, tick...
I could hear the second hand moving, and I could see it moving across the dial.
It wasn't turning normally. It swung back and forth at the "12," as if stuck there.
As the atmosphere in the room changed, the second hand suddenly began moving normally, going from "12" to "1" and then continuing onward.
I glanced at the thin man.
He looked serious, but all he did was hold up the pocket watch. He made no other movements, and his eyes weren't on me—they were fixed on the watch.
The second hand completed a full rotation. As if some switch had been flipped, the hour and minute hands, which had been stopped at four forty, began moving too.
The two slender hands spun rapidly and met the second hand at "12."
At that moment, ripples like those on the ocean appeared across the polished dial.
Blue seeped out from within the watch face, followed by green, yellow, red, and other colors.
The dial turned rainbow-colored. The colors blended together and became black.
It looked like some sort of animated digital watch face. It wasn't pretty, just novel.
The three stopped hands seemed to have been nudged. Each swept through an arc before stopping in a fixed position.
"Six seventeen and twenty-one seconds." The thin man leaned over to check the time, then gripped the pocket watch with its back facing up, as if comparing it with something and doing a calculation.
I couldn't see what the back of the watch looked