Tragedy of the Gimbles

I

I wanted to give a special thanks to Tiffany Prowess, the first person that proved crazy enough to follow me. I don't know what I did to deserve that, but I'll do my best not to let you down! This novella has been in the works for a while, and I consider it a real improvement over my last one. As always, feedback is appreciated.

-Cryspr

James Gimble sat in a square room, watching a timer count down. He had been sitting there for four hours, nine minutes, and eighteen seconds, or so the timer said. Sometimes, he wondered if the seconds it ticked out silently were somehow slower than they should be. Another punishment to throw on the pile.

The room was filled with time-keepers, covering every inch of the featureless walls. Some beeped as they counted, some didn't. Some counted up, some counted down. Some were digital, others were wall clocks, maddeningly out of sync as they ticked. None of the clocks read the same time.

The only thing in the room besides these devices was a single chair, shoddily built and made of wood. During his imprisonment, James had moved the chair constantly around the room, sometimes multiple times between sleeps. Most of the time, the moves were a desperate attempt to find a change in scenery. Staring at the same part of the wall for eternity was far from ideal to him. The move he had made most recently, however, had a more specific purpose. This time, he actually had something of interest to watch.

The timer he sat in front of was large, wider than it was tall, displaying denominations of time being separated by colons. The largest of these values was decades, represented on the far left of the line of integers. That section of the timer now read zero. So did the years, months, weeks, days, and hours. The two fields at the end were the only ones still in motion. One minute and twenty-one seconds. That was all that was left.

James didn't know what would happen when it hit zero. Maybe he would finally be freed from this place. Maybe he would die on the spot. Either way, it would be a mercy to him. Even if the Devil turned him over to his flays and whips, it would still be a change. At the very least, he would be too busy screaming to ever keep an eye on the time again.

The timer continued its steady count, digital green figures consuming his vision. When he blinked, those numbers left ghost images behind his eyelids. James vaguely recalled when his mother had caught him sitting directly in front of the television. 'You'll go cross-eyed if you sit that close,' she had chided. If only you could see me now, he thought to himself. James might have smiled, if he still had the power to do so.

The minute value changed in a single blink, joining the line of nulls to its left. James' heart leapt, and he unconsciously leaned forward in his chair, the anticipation of what he had waited for so long to see rending his mind apart. Decades of waiting, years quantified and categorized by every measurement of time known to man. Countdowns surrounding him the whole time, deaf to his hopeless pleadings to accelerate, to compress their moments just a little. Each of those countdowns had gone off during that eternity, one after the other hitting zero.

All but this one. This one last piece of the puzzle. After forty-three years, nine months, two weeks, five days, three hours, eleven minutes and fifty-nine seconds... everything would end. One way or another, it would be the end of his personal hell.

Twenty-three seconds now.

His heart was racing faster, fists clenching where they rested on his legs. Twenty seconds. Nineteen. He jumped to his feet, unable to keep still, and began pacing back and forth slowly in front of the timer, never breaking line of sight with those last two digits. A caged animal, watching his keeper fiddle with the keys.

Sixteen seconds. Almost. He felt like shouting, crying, beating his fists against the timer to make it count faster. With every change of the second, it seemed like the timer was slowing itself, like each second was longer than the last. James hoped to every God he had ever known that wasn't the case. It would be the ultimate cruelty for him if he were forced to spend a thousand years waiting for that last second to tick by, even as the clocks and count-ups around him lost their ability to count. He blocked that thought, determined not to go down that path. He could hold onto his sanity for just a little longer.

The counter hit nine seconds, letting another zero join the line. James stopped pacing, and stopped directly in front of that last number. He watched it change, two feet from his face, making its careful way towards its ultimate destination. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. James took a shaky breath. "Finally," he whispered.

The timer hit zero.

Existence itself stood still for a moment as James ceased his breathing, unable to do anything aside from stand and watch. Then the timer chimed, a clear note like that of a little bell. And before his eyes, the display changed.

It now read '999:99:99:99:99:99:99:99.'

'999:99:99:99:99:99:99:98.'

'999:99:99:99:99:99:99:97.'

James screamed. It was a scream of despair, of anger, and of abject hopelessness. All around him, bells began to chime, run-down timers suddenly waking up after years or decades. The cacophony of beeping seconds pounded into his brain, making a row which he hadn't experienced since the first few weeks he had been here. How long he screamed, James had no clue. For once, his focus was no longer on the time. Only on his own pitiful existence, his eternal moment of torture.

He cried until he no longer could, then collapsed onto the concrete floor, which didn't even have a rug to brace his falling body. It stung, but James barely noticed. His capacity to notice had vanished with the first bell.

Quietly, his voice raw, James whispered out a single word. He knew nobody could hear him, but he had to ask it anyway.

"Why..."

Ticking and beeping were his only responses.