The Marrow House

追加: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Hello once again followers. Welcome to yet another video.

[00:00:05]I hope you enjoy today's story.

[00:00:08]Sit back, relax, close your eyes, and let's delve into the dark together.

[00:00:17]Aspects of the Marrow House range from obscene to sickening, depending entirely upon which angle of the lawn you view it from. Some sides of the house may incur only a vague sense of nausea. Others may incite a rage so great it drives one into a frenzy. Of the builder I know painfully little, but of his wretched depiction of babble, I know more than I wish to. What I know for certain is that weight and gravity do not seem to weigh upon the house or its acre of profane forest in the desert. By every law known to physics, the house should collapse.

[00:00:55]While the outer shell of the structure is strange enough, it is the inside that you need to know about if you wish to survive the coming days. For your sake, and indeed the sake of humanity, I need to explain the incident in as vivid detail as I can recall. The incident I speak of, I'm afraid, was of my own doing. Curiosity has always been my most fallable weakness, and the prospect of entering a structure so bizarre was too enticing to ignore. I fear that the consequences of this action have flown far further than I anticipated. Jail time or a fine would have been dreamy, but I fear that instead I have left a bleeding wound on the face of reality itself.

[00:01:41]This all sounds very woo woo and you may think me may somewhat insane, but allow me to explain myself and perhaps explain away the patchwork creations that may or may not be appearing in the corners of your household. My name is Phil, but I go by pill in my local Herbex community.

[00:02:02]For those unaware, it stands for urban exploration, and the whole gist is exploring abandoned properties or buildings for fun. Living in the dusty hell hole of Casag Grande, Arizona, there is criminally little else to do.

[00:02:16]In a state with trees and rivers, I might have turned out a proper upright citizen of the states. I would have picked up fishing and hiking, smiling, whatever you forest fabers luxuriate in all day. Instead, burdened by the endless deserts and depressive heat, I've been a bit of a [ __ ] since youth.

[00:02:35]Though I've stayed out of prison through nothing short of divine intervention, I was in juvie at 15 following a break-in I'd been a part of. Mind you, I thought the building was abandoned. It was this old dilapidated [ __ ] shack out on the reservation, and I wanted to explore it.

[00:02:51]Wow, I remember thinking after entering an open window. This place is unlooted and untagged. While most of the Urb community lives and breathes by the rule not to loot abandoned buildings, I was a broke teenager desperately in need of weed money. Seeing the detritus of a hoarder in the house, I'd thought it a pirates horde ready to be looted. The man who found me unplugging his TV did not understand the unique circumstances and held me at gunpoint until the cops arrived. Urban exploration has brought me the highest highs and the lowest lows. Exploring the broken and forgotten places of the world is a subject of intense fascination to me. Old mines, abandoned hospitals, airfield boneyards.

[00:03:36]These places are as good as the Garden of Eden to me. In those moments, I feel like a kid again, exploring the unknown.

[00:03:43]A light with wonder and curiosity.

[00:03:46]Finding old paperwork and filing cabinets betrayed by time. Finding objects of mysterious nature beneath dust heaps and refues. I am a thief, but only of the curious sort. Have you ever taken a pretty rock from a national park? Ever plucked a pretty flower from a public park and given it to your significant other? To me, taking from abandoned buildings is the same. I take what I think can harmlessly be taken.

[00:04:12]You'll never catch me scrapping water boilers, and rumaging for antiques, but you will catch me taking belt loops, ornate tiles, and small objects of trivial consequence.

[00:04:22]what I would do now to go back in time and beat this hobby out of my younger self to save the world so much trouble.

[00:04:30]Let me formally introduce you to the Marrow Residence. It exists deep in the reservation, nestled at the far end of a dusty dirt hillside beside an abandoned gold mine. At least that was where it existed yesterday.

[00:04:46]It was Wednesday and I'd just finished exploring an abandoned gold mine a buddy of mine had sent me the GPS pinned to. 4 hours alone in the womb of the earth and I'd finally resurfaced. I was in a cherry mood seeing that there was no invisible alarms or police presence at the site. I took in the surroundings, admiring the clouds in the distance. I remember staring at the tips of trees poking out over the hillside and wrestling with my memory for any inclination that they'd been there when I'd arrived. From what little I could see of them, they were big, healthy oaks, the wobbling bulbs of leaves wavering to me from behind a craggy hill. Seeing that the only other trees for 100 miles were the wiry, sad swords only a desert can nurture. This was shocking. They looked like healthy, proper trees with good soil and a water source. Noting the expanse of roing desert hills and cacti from miles around me, my curiosity was infallible, I crested the hill and found an oasis tucked into the recesses of a small canyon. I stared at it for a long time, confused by what my eyes were trying to convey to me. At the bottom of this lifeless desert gorge was a single square acre of lush forest. It looked torn out of another state and injected into the landscape with perfect green grass spotted with wild flowers and overlapping root networks from the trees. The sound of rustling leaves caught the wind and a sensual whisper in my ears. This was strange but not ecologically impossible. Somehow the soil here had prospered. Somehow these plants were getting a sustainable amount of water. There must be an aquafer beneath that reasoned. I'd gone caving in every free climb cave, legal and illegal, in a 200 m radius of my apartment. The prospect of an undiscovered water cave had me wet to the chops. But the acre wasn't just a verdant patch of heaven.

[00:06:46]In the center stood a house hidden and warped in the property's net of branches. From what little was visible, it seemed profoundly wrong. a reliable source of architectural advice. I am not. But I didn't think that houses were supposed to be so erratic. It was two stories, slanted at a strange angle, as if partially sunk into the ground.

[00:07:11]Windows were not square and latched, but tarped off in strange streaks, as if the claws of a great beast had rad the timber, and windows had been constructed in the gaps.

[00:07:23]The longer I looked at it, the more curious I became. Bile stung the back of my throat as I pondered why the roof drooped down around the side like a waterfall of shingles crawling like a vein across the soil beside the house.

[00:07:36]My mind raced for explanations on why an entire room on the second story was unsupported from underneath or why at the crest of the house there was an enormous church bell. It looked like a failed experiment. the ambitious manner of some eccentric architect who had gone bankrupt halfway through his masterpiece, but to me it looked wholly abandoned.

[00:07:59]Ivy had claimed all aspects of the house, and the tarps on the windows were loose and sunbleleached. Obviously, I went to explore it. If you say you wouldn't, I would think you're lying.

[00:08:10]Presented with something so unique, so totally unknown, it was impossible to resist. I'd come for the cheap thrill of breaking into an abandoned gold mine and had struck a different kind of gold. You see, it's a very prestigious thing to know a spot that nobody else knows about in the world. It's a show of one's expertise, a subtle flex of one's capabilities as a scout that earns you the respect of your peers. I'd been shown new places by my buddies time and time again, and I wanted to return the favor by bringing them something that stood out. So I descended the slope. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon by now, and the sun beat down brightly between the thickets of clouds. Every few seconds, one would pass beneath the sun and cast a great shadow on me as I climbed carefully down the rocky hillside. By the time I reached the grass down in the valley, the house became more and more visually unappealing. As I stared, I swallowed vomit and held back an involuntary groan of sorrow. The closest thing I can compare the situation to is waking on a day of a highly anticipated vacation and feeling suddenly mortified by the prospect of traveling. It was a sudden overwhelming sense of trepidation tinged with something like sorrow. The house was not just ugly but upsettingly hideous. It made me angry. Flashing directionless rage that crept into my skull and achd my mind. Each heartbeat pulsed pain in my skull, the sound like a war drum in my ears. But I knew that if I didn't explore this place now, I would be back by nightfall. I wouldn't rest until the mystery of this place was settled, until the house was explored and every chance of a cave entrance was exhausted. If you feel an otherworldly sensation overcoming every aspect of your being, usually it's a fine idea to listen to it, especially when the sensation comes as a warning. As I waited into the tall grass, I found a mailbox with embossed letters on the side spelling marrow and peeling stickons. As a distraction from the headache and the sudden unfounded hatred for all things architectural, I checked the mailbox. It was packed to the brim with mail, several envelopes spilling out like a stationary avalanche. Many were bills labeled with red bands proclaiming important and foreclosed.

[00:10:32]So, the poor bastard had gone bankrupt building the creepy house. After all, most strange among the mailbox's contents was the greeting cards. There were dozens of them, all addressed to H.

[00:10:43]Mero. Of the sender, there was only an identical oily black smear on each card, like a strange printing press error. One was from Portland, another from Brazil.

[00:10:54]There was one from a city I had never seen before. a strange place of black rock and hvels that shot into the sky like spears. Everyone in the photo was barely discernible, but I swore that their arms were too long for their bodies. Their faces were blurred, I assumed, for privacy. In the center of the city was an enormous clock tower, a thing of intricate beauty. The picture was black and white, and a very strange crackling pattern covered the sky.

[00:11:24]Greetings from Lucifales, read the card.

[00:11:28]I figured it must be some gag gift. An obscure movie reference I didn't get.

[00:11:33]Later, research provided that Loifales is not from any piece of media, and reverse image searches turned up no results. In total, there were 26 greeting cards. The Loafales card was the only abnormal one. The rest are very real greeting cards from very real cities, though each of the pictures did seem strangely out of focus. All of the dates were smeared over with the same inky blot as the signatures. This was strange, but I chocked it up to the owner falling victim to some strange practical joke. What bothered me more was considering how the mail route here would be vivaciously inconvenient for a mailman. Scaling down dusty gulches was not part of their job requirements, and there were no ways to maneuver a vehicle onto it that I could see. But here was the mail anyway. I'd almost forgotten my anger at the house when I heard the thing settle in the distance. Its timbers groaned in broken agony, like the wet cracks of bone you hear when elderly people stand up. I remember screaming at it to shut up, the words frothing out from nowhere. Why the hell would I tell a house to shut up? I certainly hadn't meant to. A wise person with more wits than I would have turned back by now. I could blame the whippetss in high school, maybe the glue I huffed in kindergarten, but I'd been lacking in the intellectual department for a long time. So, I carried on, even though the house settled too frequently, like every gust of wind was causing it extreme pain, and its only resppite was its subterranean moans. Biting back my next verbal outbreak at it for its insulence, I began pushing my way through the tall grass towards the house. All of the trees on the property had looked healthy from the hilltop, but each and everyone had a rotten hollow within, large enough for a man to squeeze into. What bothered me about this was that the gaping hollows all faced towards the house. It was like something had crawled out of each of these trees, freed from their timber prisons, and beginning a pilgrimage into the house. From where I stood among the trees, I knew this symmetry was wholly unnatural. This only served to peique my curiosity even more.

[00:13:45]An emotion that was waring with the flashes of hot rage and boiling sickness when I perceived the house in its entirety. As a weward wind picked up, the church bell thundled softly in its mountains, not quite chiming, but rumbling melodically. The trees stopped swishing in the wind and began whispering instead. Fast gossiping murmurss passed between them as their eye bore down on me. Accusatory howls now facing my back. I got the notion that there were eyes I could not meet in those hollows, and I dared not turn to meet them.

[00:14:22]Root systems became unnaturally thick the farther I descended into the plot to the point where knots of roots began to grow upward like flower stems. They crept up at a crooked angle, each and every one magnetized to the house like a compass needle. They formed a thick wall as tall as a man a piece. Why was this house so paradoxically strange? How could such a place exist? That knowledge would prove nearly too much to bear.

[00:14:51]Squeezing between the thicket of roots, I stumbled into a clear opening. With no roots, no leaves, and detritus, I got my first unbidden look at the house. I'd sworn that the room that hung 30 ft off the building had been on the right side.

[00:15:06]But it was now defiantly hanging off to the left side of the crooked building.

[00:15:11]The church bell grumbled and distant, the trees chattered in primeval tongues.

[00:15:16]With a start, I realized the roots behind me sported carved visages of agonized men. Thousands upon thousands of wailing ants in the gloom of the whispering canopy. So old Marrow had been a hell of a wood carver. A psychotic one at that, but it fit the bill for someone who would build this.

[00:15:39]Archer towers sprouted from random sections of the rooftop. genuine battlements of timber with bow slits and strange roofs slanted like spearheads. I counted eight tumorous chimneys, bulbous and uneven like they'd caught an obscene sickness. The windows, previously great slashes to the stories, were arranged in bewildering triangle formations like fractals. The tarps having moved to support the new formation. In no world was this the same house I'd spotted from the hillside, even from the mailbox. Had the building always been so tall? Had it always had four stories, uneven and crooked like a loose pocket cigarette?

[00:16:20]Everything was spinning, blinding whirls of hatred the likes of which I'd never experienced, slamming into me from every angle. If a man had shot my entire family and killed my dog to boot, I think at that moment I'd still hate the house more. It was blind, irrational hatred. Most hatred tends to be, but this anger feels like an external force pressing against my psyche. In an attempt to find a suitable entrance, I tried to do a quick circle around the house. The house was far more stout than anticipated, and the more I tried to walk around the house, the more I realized how ineffectual my sense of dimensions were. Buildings generally had four walls and a roof. But the marrow house had upwards of a hundred of each.

[00:17:04]Where I assumed a wall would end where I could earn access to a cardinal direction of the house, two more walls would sprout before me, defiantly appearing out of thin air. Fixtures became increasingly obscene with gargoyles perched on various objects far too light to support their weight. One gargoyle was an operational fountain spouting out water from its perch on the side of a tumorous chimney. There was no marble base, no support for the crawling stone creature to plausibly be uprighted by. I don't know how long my single lap of the house took, but it was well over 10 minutes. The color of the house was another matter of great upset for me.

[00:17:44]Patchworks of color reminiscent of a quilt. Each color was muted, appearing sunbleleached for hundreds of years. The faintest Robin's egg blue would shift into an ugly intestine brown, shifting further into the hue of a red carpet made in ancient Egypt. A portion of the house warped like a helix, creating an uneven wall that carved inward at its base and bulged outward towards the top.

[00:18:09]All around me, the grizzled faces carved in the vertical roots stared on as if jealous of my ability to enter the house where they could only watch. When I completed my lap of the building, there was a door. It hadn't been there before, but it now stood defiantly on a porch of solid concrete. The door betrayed no hints of its age, masked in fresh maroon paint, wholly unburdened by the sun. An intricate brass door knob that had oxidized to the point of being almost entirely turquoise colored contradicted the notion that this door was in any way new. There was a large lacy knocker depicting a deer head. Its eyes were impenetrable spheres of dark onyx set in brass fixtures. Its mouth opened just enough to show strange whale-like teeth.

[00:18:56]Against all wisdom, I grabbed the door handle. As I stepped inside the marrow house, my anger washed away, sloughed off at the threshold like I'd shed a coat, and hung it up on the rack. I remembered feeling relieved, like I'd taken some overwhelming drug that had finally worn off. The inside was every bit as eccentric as the outside. The open atrium sporting a spiral metal staircase up 50 ft. There were no visible floors above the first, only the doineering ceiling so far above. Of the rooms that hung without gravity on the side of the house, I could faintly see lushly decorated rooms with no way to access them from the entrance. The main room, at eye level, was bare and unimaginative. Furniture existed, but it was all pushed away from the central piece of the room. A massive grandfather clock ticked away, bracketed to the floor with enormous bolts and mountings as if to keep it from flying away. I'd seen industrial factory equipment held down by less. Several iron beams shot out of the walls to hold it steady from the sides, pristinely polished and free of rust. Large stacks of paper cluttered the legions of desks lining the outside of the room, yellowy and frayed.

[00:20:12]It was less paper and more papyrus scroll. Imperfections and holes in every sheet. Throughout all my years of urban exploration, I'd never seen anything like this building. Buildings were not free. Certainly not cheap. So, who had farted around with thousands of pounds of timber and plaster to create this useless monolith in the desert? who had wasted so much money on building this abomination.

[00:20:36]Maybe it was an abandoned movie set, the strange setting of some flopped horror movie. The house settled. As I looked up, I found a ceiling over my head.

[00:20:47]Unadorned plaster accompanied by eight concentric ceiling fans that were fully in motion. The spinning blades of the fans, each taken from a different place in time, were so close to one another, that they appeared almost to collide.

[00:21:01]This was the last straw. The rational part of me caved to the unknown. All my human attempts at reasoning the place away were flimsy and frail. This was something completely out of my bounds of understanding. And that should have been far more terrifying than it was. But Herbex is all about venturing into the unknown, finding the most obscure corners of the earth and staking your claim. This Twilight Zone ass house was the definition of obscene. An abandoned building that defied the laws of reality in my mind was the single coolest thing I could imagine. I could claim the place as my own by providing I'd been the first to tag it. Stupid. Yes, of course it is. But I was presented with the supernatural for the first time in my life. And it was my way of conquering the fear. I took out the purple and black spray paint from my pack and spritzed a hazy tag on the wall. pill in bold purple block letters outlined by spiky black offshoots. It was halfway through the first L that I realized the drips of paint were crawling up the wall towards the ceiling. After a moment, the paint began to scab up like a human flesh wound. Some part of my brain finally clicked into place that there was great danger in the unknown, and I was meddling with forces far from my comprehension.

[00:22:23]I left the paint and scrambled for the door. Tearing it open, I found a new room. A bathroom from an indoor pool, all tile and porcelain.

[00:22:33]Brazers on the wall cast eerie fire light across the room. The clashing time periods giving me whiplash. I slowly swung it shut, opened it again. Maybe the house was feeling generous. It was not.

[00:22:47]There were no other doors, only gaping doorways that led deeper into unknown chambers. The windows were hidden above the ceiling. Now, new fixtures filled the room, including new walls free of my paint and a spiral staircase of masterfully chiseled marble descending from the roof. It was supported by a cage of brass fanning out in extraordinary depictions of flowers.

[00:23:10]Each step appeared to be carved to mimic dozens of rows of human teeth. Each time I clashed my hands over my eyes and feared and bewilderment, the room would become new. The only constant besides myself was the grandfather clock and its brutish mountings. The soft metronome of the second hand ticking away. I noticed for the first time that it was not a traditional clock with 12 hours, but a full 24. Each hour was its own triangle.

[00:23:39]A 24th of the clock face divided into triangles for each number. The triangles all set with an ornate number sporting masterful paintings. The first hour was a radiant flower field with a resting fawn and a happy bumblebees.

[00:23:54]How a painting could be so detailed in such a small area was beyond me. It was masterwork beyond my wildest comprehension. So realistic yet so stylized in oil paint. Each triangle of a circular clock became more erratic as the hours became higher. Each painting growing fuzzier and more vibrant in color. Colors began soft in the first eight hours. Depictions of calm waters and verdant fields. These all felt peaceful. Felt as if all was right in the worlds they depicted. 9 through 18 were deserts, broken plains, and deserted towns with increasingly destitute inhabitants. These inhabitants, I realized, had blurred faces and various imperfections in proportion. Without faces, I didn't know how I could tell they were crying. 19 to 23 were perfect pictures of suffering on Earth. Death, war, pestilence. Each triangle was almost entirely brown, gray, and black. Muted colors oppressed by the presence of bright red stains of blood and fire. The 24th was a masterpiece. Its tile came unbidden to my mind as clearly as if it had been labeled.

[00:25:10]Annihilation, the total desolation of Earth in the crulest, slowest ways imaginable.

[00:25:20]The angels of heaven carved into the flesh of man with such ferocity, such deranged determination that the demons in the margins wept. It was only a two-foot long triangle of a painting.

[00:25:31]And yet its many aspects seemed to stretch for miles. The longer I stared, the wider the painting seems to grow.

[00:25:39]More suffering, more wretched angles breaking the sky with their rapid fall from heaven. The city depicted was black obsidian spirel-like structures broken by the sheer force of divine impact. The painting I realized was of the strange city from the cart. Loses in ruin. A new sound came from above, different from the house's groans. Tap creek. Tap creek footsteps. In my slackjaw stuper at the painting, the room had changed yet again. It was now a forest of spiral staircases, a scattering of ceramic vases between each one. I covered my eyes, trying to change the room for the better. But this time, it offered me no sucker. No matter where I stepped, I would come dangerously close to knocking over a vase. Dangerously close to making a sound. There were hundreds of the things ranging from tiny pots to 4ft centerpieces of masterful artistry. The footsteps were just above me now, just above the brand's new all brick ceiling barely above the top of my head. It was like the house was trying to rat me out as silently as I could manage. I took the lid from one of the largest phases next to me and carefully used the bars of the staircases on either side of me to vault into it, sealing myself in with the lid. None too soon as the footsteps soon pounded on the metal grates of one of the staircases. I dared not peak yet.

[00:27:06]The weight on the staircases sounded human. Best I could picture. Was there a man living in this magical carnival house? How ironic it would be if my punishment for impending on the Eldrich was merely a few years in jail. It sounded dreamy compared to the countless alternatives.

[00:27:25]The person's gate was slow and methodical. A click of something hard on metal announcing each step. A cane.

[00:27:34]Vases.

[00:27:36]Vases.

[00:27:37]The voice of the man. A very old man from the sounds of it. He had the low croaky tenor of a man on the brink of death.

[00:27:47]Must you torment me so? He croked to himself. What must have been his cane cracked into a vase, shattering it into a thousand priceless shards. I heard the man grumble as he stepped through the ruin, shattering vases as he went. Each one sounded closer, oscillating between holding my breath for silence's sake and hyperventilating. I prayed that my sarcophagus wouldn't come crushing down around me.

[00:28:15]Thankfully, it did not. I heard the man's uinous path continue away from me towards the clock. Daring a peak, I lifted up the vase's crown with my head and peaked out like a frog surveying a pond. He was every bit as ancient as I'd expected. More so, I'd never seen a man so singularly old in my life, so brittle and tiny. He was extremely short, his back bent forward at a shrimpish angle.

[00:28:44]Crooked shoulders bent too far forward in their sockets, barely attached to the spine so defined it looked like the spiky dorsal fin of a fish. His liver spot doubled scalp was accompanied by only the most sympathetic of white hairs. He carried with him a briefcase and unfortunately was not wearing a single bit of clothing. His feet bled from stepping on ceramic shards, but he paid them no heed. I watched him purge the briefcase on a vase, opening it to reveal a line of glittering oddities.

[00:29:15]Each looked more fine and obscure than the last, winding pipes with keyike teeth, whirling spirals of metal that shone with the obolescent cast of oil and water. A small withered human head carved from oak so realistic that I jumped at its advent. Grabbing the two stiff head, he wo it around before the face of the clock while chanting quietly to himself. By now I was far too mesmerized to turn away. The house settled angrily. Its creaking grew to epic proportions as the walls racked and buckked, pulling inward and pushing outward as if great winds moved it to the brink of collapse. With a booming trill, the bells laughed from miles above the building. But the head had some profound effect on the clock as the timbers of its seams relaxed like muscles. A panel of the fine mahogany dropped open, though no indicators a door had been there before were visible.

[00:30:15]Inside was pandemonium, a nest of metal tubes, small clockwork mechanisms of gears and pistons, modern devices like small LED displays, and technology I couldn't quite comprehend. It was as if the clock was made of every century of development, those long passed and those not yet to be. I watched the mechanisms work in perfect clockwork. Everything so perfectly set that despite the mechanical guts being packed without room to spare. Not a single piece collided with another. Beauty had so many forms, but I had never comprehended it on this scale before. The inside of that clock was suddenly like staring at heaven laid bare, and I nearly vaulted out of my vase in an attempt to leap into the man-sized hole housing its inards. To become one with the workings, to have my very own perfect place in its holy order was suddenly all I could ever ask for. The man took a small ivory carving of a hippo and handed it to two tiny anthropomorphic arms dangling from the top of the clock's gaping wound.

[00:31:22]Those tiny little arms swayed about, moving out of the way of backrackcking pistons with a millisecond perfect timing. As the claw-like arm seized the hippo, a portion of pipes piouetted away to the back of the confines, opening a view to a modern-day alarm clock with a tiny stone sund dial grown into its top.

[00:31:43]The mummy of a man retrieved a strange copper pipe. Clicking a button at its base, a tiny diarama of the planets began to spin around its tip, which glowed with the ferocity of a miniature sun. Casting the rod over the sund dial, the digital display's face rapidly rewound to zero, and a series of pistons and gears at the bottom of the box racked up and over, facilitating the view of a chrome growth of glowing technology that I could not possibly parse the function of. Thick cord-like spirals grew into the walls of the box like nerves. To these the man offered the oily key, then produced a small flute and piped a series of 24 notes, each slightly less skilled in performance than the last. In satisfaction, the chrome box ceased glowing, and the perfect clockwork danced elegantly aside to reveal a water wheel being turned by a floating current of blood. There were too many questions, too many answers I wasn't sure I wanted.

[00:32:46]While I did not kill Harold Merrow myself, I gravely misjudged my timing to speak. I shouted to him from my ceramic confines, too overwhelmed to remain in isolation any longer. Um, "Hello," I shouted over the den of the house. He startled, dropping the oily key as he retracted it from the nerves. With a whip of movements too fast for this age, he turned to face me. His mouth hung dumbly open, bottom jaw flickering with fear. He took a single step back in terror at the sight of me. And that was all the clock needed.

[00:33:20]The clockwork leapt out. Each piece of the machine sprung, fanning out like a casting net at an unsuspecting minnow.

[00:33:28]Before the man could turn back to his task, it devoured him. Networks of impossibly fine, impossibly sharp wires seized the back of his skull, puncturing skin and muscle and courarssing beneath like worms to seize the skull in an inward cocoon. There was no blood, but the clock did not waste a drop. A dry pour overtook the man's face, his eyeballs shriveling in their sockets to withered prunes, dangling by their cords set in the black caves of his eye sockets. His lips became cracked paper, his skin going loose from the flesh beneath, like a piece of ham draped over a skull. I was too horrified to scream.

[00:34:09]I just watched, sputtering like a baby who'd just done something very, very bad. The alarm clock shot forth small probes joining with the bones of his shoulders with a series of cracks. His skin sagged from his bones as wet muscle began to grow on the inside of the clock, inversing the guts of man and clock. As pieces of machinery shattered and overtook bone, as wires wound tightly to form artificial muscles, the clock grew organic. Somehow, Harold Maro was still alive. He groaned as his arms jerked involuntarily, too stiff at the joints at first, but learned to move by the second. His fingers, which were now pierced with little brass blades beneath the nail, carved open his own stomach.

[00:34:55]organs supported by clockwork spider legs swarmed out of the open cavity out onto his outstretched arms and into the waiting chasm of the clock. I hope for his sake that he was already dead before this. The organs settled themselves into various aspects of the muscular box, assisted by spider legs and pincers and living wires of brats. As the windpipe was affixed, the clock began to breathe, the timbers of its exterior shuddering into delight. In the center of it all was the man's heart, beating slowly, uncertainly, but beating nonetheless.

[00:35:32]Quickly, mechanical pincers freed themselves from the clock keeper's open stomach, using bits of discarded bone as support struts for walls and ceilings of fatty tissue slabs. The effect was that of a house diarama. Each organ secluded in its own dollhouse room of soping wet flesh. While the clock grew saded from the man's lifeblood, the perfect machinery needed new confines. I watched as the skin suit grew taught once more, gaping in gruesome stupification at the clock's keeper. He was being refilled bit by bit. The perfect machinery finding new purpose in its limbs, in the hollowedout chest cavity, in the skull.

[00:36:12]that, to my knowledge, still held its brain. Pistons oscillated the length of his arms and legs, refilling each appendage with more and more lattice work until he was nearly twice his original height. His skin cracked and showed a brass workings beneath, and I was made sick by how beautiful I found the gears and pistons, levers, and bolts. The clockwork man took a jerking step forward. A wet freshborn animal taking its first wobble out of the womb.

[00:36:42]The tiny mechanical arms from the top of the machine broke through the front of his skull, breaking through his eye sockets with a dry crack. Those tiny arms beckoned me forth. A mother holding out her arms for the nurse to deposit her newborn child to. It crashed into vases with each erratic step, trying to voice sounds with powerful gusts of air from somewhere deep in his chest. Each came out as a shrill whistle that fluttered the lips, sending the sand dry tongue flapping like a flag of surrender. It was trying to speak, but it knew not how to spend the air. I closed my eyes to blink away tears, and the room became new. The vases were gone, as were the staircases. There was only a ring of furniture as it had been when I'd entered. There was shaggy office carpet, low light incandescent.

[00:37:34]The clock dominated the room, still confined by its brackets, it vibrated and trembled as if trying to break free from them. Numbly, I watched as the hour clock rapidly approached 24. In the tiny sliver of painting set behind the hands, I saw the old man. He was the centerpiece. his hands pulling apart either end of his gaping chest cavity to reveal only clockwork. The automation hacked and whistled, clacking its jaw repeatedly as it tried to forage for syllables in the effort. Wires of copper wrapped in muscle fiber bound the once man to the clock's insides without much slack to allow movement a few feet past the clock. It seems that it could not reach me. a relief of proportion that you cannot possibly fathom. In the new room, I sought an escape. The red door sat where it should have, and my shock was wide open. The sight of trees and sunshine made me hack up a sob of longing. As I stared at the hand marking the seconds overlapping with the minute halfway to the 24-hour mark, I understood. It was not a clock that repeated. It was a timer. And I could only imagine that the old man had spent his many days winding the clock back. I watched the guardian of the clock, his duty forcibly having changed hands.

[00:38:59]Where once he had guarded the clock, preventing it from completing its cycle, he now guarded it bitterly to ensure it did. I couldn't possibly fathom what brand of Armageddon a monstrosity like this could herald. I didn't want to find out, but nor could I approach the clock in the vaguest attempt to unwind it.

[00:39:19]From the few steps I'd seen the old man take, I knew that I had all but killed the keeper of great libraries of priceless information.

[00:39:32]The managed almost a coherent sound, teeth clacking frustratingly as it tried to replicate it. Go, go, go.

[00:39:44]>> The mechanical baby arms that pierced his eye sockets pointed to the forest. I didn't want to listen, but I felt I had no other option. With mere minutes before the clock reached the 24th hour, I fled. I fled for my life, past the ranks of wooden men now wearing masks of rage. Past the mailbox with thousands of greeting cards now flowing out like in an infinite cascade. I ran to my car and ripped off back onto the freeway.

[00:40:10]Driving felt alien after what I'd just seen. Just living felt wrong. I am a coward. The best kind of coward is a man who is afraid but struggles through the crippling fear and into failure. The worst kind of coward, a man like me, lets the shackles of fear bind and keep.

[00:40:30]I did not even try to wind back the clock, even though I knew a great calamity would come if I did not. There is no doubt in my mind that what I saw was real. I don't expect you to believe me until the clockwork begins to appear in your home, in the forests, in the streets.

[00:40:46]Ever since the clock struck the 24th hour, things have been appearing in the shadows of my home. Small pieces of clockwork machinery at first, gears, wire, brackets, and the like. This was unsettling enough as each item was rather large and unseemingly in my apartment, but I'd eagerly take the loose pieces over the alternative.

[00:41:08]Currently, there are five anomalies trapped in various places in my apartment. They are the clock's attempts at making life. One, which I have secluded to the bathroom, is a dead crab with animatronic claws and a multitude of oscillating pistons that simulate his scuttling motion. It was dodgedly determined to swipe at me, and no amount of stomping seems to harm the thing.

[00:41:33]There is a perfect balance between man and machine, and I fear that the clock will not stop until it finds it. It plays god. Maybe it is a god. I honestly don't know. I just finished reinforcing the cupboard with several boards, which is now the prison of a severed deer head that slinks around on segmented clockwork tubes, like how an octopus would crawl on land. It whispered my name as I sealed it away, despite having no lungs with which to speak. It is learning. It is perfecting.

[00:42:07]After the first two creations, I drove back to the Marow House. It felt much like trying to stop a gunshot wound with a band-aid, but it was the very least I could do. Of the house, there was only one sign of it ever having been there.

[00:42:20]The trees, the wretched home itself, are nowhere to be seen. Only the mailbox remains and a torrential heap of greeting cards. They all proudly announce, "Greetings from Losales."

[00:42:35]When I returned home, I dealt with more minor clockwork abominations. As I finish this documentary, finish cataloging my misdeeds for all to see and judge, I hear an abomination far, far worse. Heavy footsteps at first, then scratching. It's moved to kicking.

[00:42:56]It's inside. It speaks with my voice.

[00:43:00]I'm so so sorry.

[00:43:05]Fear not, brothers and sisters of the Obsidian City. I believe that our stay in Musafalis won't be half as bad as we think. See the Obsidian spires and take heart. See the clock and all its indomitable glory and see divinity unveiled. Under the bleeding skies and broken stars, we will all be made one.

[00:43:31]As the Herald of Lucifales, I formally invite you all to the Marrow House. We will throw a party to celebrate the unification of an imperfect planet and be made one in the hearts of the broken stars. The clockwork feels far, far more freeing than flesh. The pleasures of skin are made dull by comparison to the ecstasy of perfect tandem.

[00:43:56]You will feel your pistons fire, feel your perfectly oiled gears turn without chafe, and wonder why you ever bothered with skin and bone.

[00:44:07]Crawl from your shells, accept our gracious host, and see the city. You will be free.

[00:44:16]We will be free together.

[00:44:26]And that's a wrap. I cannot even remember what day we're on anymore, but uh that's another one for 30 and 30.

[00:44:33]Thank you all so much for hanging out and for listening. I hope that you enjoyed today's story. Please be sure to hit that subscribe button if you feel Oh god, I feel like a nasty YouTuber. No, I'm just kidding. If you if you don't want to, it's cool, man. If I'm serious.

[00:44:45]But um yeah, have a good day everybody.

[00:44:48]I hope that you enjoyed today's story.

[00:44:49]Uh yeah, I'll catch you in the next one.

[00:44:51]Uh, bye-bye. Make sure to destroy that like button. Yeah. No, I can't do the YouTuber voice, man. It's just It doesn't make sense. That's not going to work at all.