The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Cerise crossed the rain-slicked street to the entrance of the store, keeping her hood up over her head with one hand to protect from the downpour. Even through the blur of the rain, the marquis was still legible: “The Old Clock Shop.”

It lacked the ‘PE’ Cerise might have expected— it should have perhaps been written as Ye Olde Clocke Shoppe, but it wasn’t. But, she considered, as she stepped up off the street and onto the sidewalk, maybe that was a good sign. Clearly the store was not concerned with gimmicks— that meant it was more likely to be authentic.

The entrance door was heavy and wooden, but luckily it had a pull bar. Cerise took hold of it, and heaved back against it, pulling the door open. She quickly stepped through before it could swing shut again.

The store was not a large one, but it might have been larger than it seemed. It gave the impression of being small because it was so cramped. As the marquis had promised, this was a clock store. There could be no doubt about that: it was full of clocks of every size, standing and otherwise.

The marquis’ other claim was more dubious: the store itself didn’t look old. It looked like any other rented storefront. If the descriptor was meant to apply to the clocks, it was even more dubious. Many of the clocks did not look old, so much as they looked like failed modern art projects. (Or successful modern art projects? Cerise had never had the appreciation nor the time for modern art).

It didn’t matter, anyway. Cerise had not come to buy a clock.

“Hello?” She called, as she began trying to navigate the rows of clocks. Surprisingly, given the number of clocks it held, the store was almost entirely silent.

“The counter is over here,” she heard a woman’s voice call back from her right. Cerise took it as her marker and navigated right, around a tall standing clock. It took another minute or two of weaving past the merchandise, but soon enough the promised counter came into view. Behind it stood the woman who had spoken. What struck Cerise most about her was that she looked drab, and normal— a store this eccentric should have had an equally eccentric and strange owner, but this woman did not match. She was an entirely forgettable figure.

When the woman saw her, she gave Cerise a smile. “I’m Tanya,” she said. “I’m the proprietor of this shop.”

Any thought that perhaps the woman was only a hired cashier (thus explaining her drabness and mismatch with the store and its contents) was dispelled. Cerise moved past her judgement (and— disappointment?), and returned Tanya’s smile. “I’m Cerise,” she said. “I asked around my network of sellers about anyone who might be selling a specific silver pocket watch— they told me you sometimes have pocket watches in inventory. Do you have any at the moment?”

Tanya’s expression became thoughtful. “Let me look in the back. It might take me a few minutes— while you wait, feel free to take a look at the clocks. If you’re feeling adventurous and don’t mind getting lost you can go back a few aisles. But there are plenty just behind you, if you don’t want to navigate back to the counter after.” Then she turned and disappeared through the door, leaving Cerise alone.

Cerise didn’t particularly feel like navigating the maze of clocks a second time, so took Tanya’s suggestion and turned around to see what she was standing in front of. Directly behind her, there was yet another standing clock— though to say it was ‘standing’ was a bit of a stretch. Cerise would have said it had been malformed in the workshop, but its oddness was so extreme it couldn’t have been the product of anything other than direct intention.

The base of the clock was square to the floor, but then the body of it lurched and curved drastically to the right, as if it were falling over. Then the clock’s face pulled back left again. It was disorienting even to look at.

Cerise took a step closer, to look at the clock’s face. The glass, or what was set behind the glass was a strange color of blue that was almost neon— but when Cerise paid even closer attention, she realized that the hands of the clock were warped, and affixed to the face in reverse. This threw her, but she kept staring at it. It was too bizarre to look away from. The numbers were also on the clock backwards, and they ran counterclockwise instead of clockwise.

Despite its presence in the clock store, Cerise seriously doubted whether anyone would be able to tell anything remotely close to time with this clock. She looked back to the warped hands, and realized they were twitching in place— even when the clock was on, the hands couldn’t even move in a full circle. They were stuck and twitching in place.

Apart from the standing clocks in the store, there were also mid-size partition walls for hanging clocks to hang from. Just behind the piece she’d been looking at, on the partition wall there, three clocks hung in a vertical row. They looked like they must have come out of the same workshop, because their backings were other shades of neon, their numbers were scrambled and haphazard, and their hands were not moving regularly.

The one with orange backing had hands that spun so fast in a circle they were only a blur. The one with the purple backing had hands that ran in opposite directions of each other, and the third had one hand that didn’t move at all.

Cerise was still frowning at the display before her when Tanya came back into the room. “Some of them are really more like decorative pieces,” she said, interrupting Cerise’s reverie.

Cerise turned back around to face her. “And they can’t all be antiques, right? Those look… new.”

Tanya nodded. “I like to offer a range of time pieces, antique and modern, practical and decorative. The idea is to curate a collection for buyers to peruse that’s unlike any other they can find. Sometimes I even sell art pieces on commission for their artists, if the piece is clock or time-based.”

Cerise gave a half-nod back at the clock. “And is that an art piece?”

Tanya smiled. “Yes, it is. I actually made those four.”

Cerise swallowed her criticisms of the clocks immediately. “Oh,” was all she said.

Tanya looked past her, to look back at the clocks. “Yes, it was satisfying to make a set of dysfunctional clocks. I’m surrounded constantly by practical, working clocks, and spend a fair amount of my time keeping them in working order. Flouting the rules of functionality was incredibly cathartic. It does feel good to break things down, sometimes, or let them break down on their own, doesn’t it?”

Cerise wasn’t quite sure how to answer the question. After Tanya’s rambling musings, the question had been unexpectedly pointed. Cerise didn’t know what else to do, so she nodded.

“What were you trying to say with them, as the artist?” Cerise asked after a few seconds, only out of politeness.

“That time is fleeting and easy to warp,” Tanya said, with a tight smile this time. “It can bleed away so quickly, or drag by so slowly. It’s hardly an objective constant as most tend to think. But enough about me,” she added, after a moment. “I think I found the watch you wanted.”

Tanya held out her closed hand, and uncurled her fingers. The silver watch— the exact silver watch that Cerise had searched everywhere for was lying in the palm of Tanya’s hand, with the chain curling back around it like a tail.

“That’s it,” Cerise breathed. “That’s exactly it.” She reached for it with a shaking hand. Tanya held her hand steady, and Cerise took the watch from it, raising it closer to her face to inspect it.

She turned it over, searching for the monogram on the base that would confirm definitively that it was the watch she was seeking. She squinted for a second— and then found it. It really was the right watch.

Cerise looked back to Tanya. “How much for it?” She pressed.

Tanya gave her an appraising look for a long minute. Then, she reached below the counter, and took hold of something. She had set in on the counter in the next minute— it was a mantelpiece clock. As if Cerise had not spoken at all, Tanya carefully pried open the clock face, retrieved a small tool from a drawer, and began carefully plying at the clock.

“Excuse me,” Cerise said, with a little edge to her voice. She’d stood making small talk out of politeness far longer than necessary, and she’d had more than her fill. Now, with the watch in her hand, she was eager to make the transaction and leave. If she were being honest with herself, she had to admit, the shop and its proprietor were a little off-putting; she would be relieved to leave them behind her.

“Yes, you’d like to buy the watch,” Tanya acknowledged, without looking up from her tinkering. “We can talk about that, but I need to set this clock— I’m capable of doing both at once.”

Cerise frowned. “Talk about it? What is there to talk about?”

“Well,” Tanya said, “If you know anything about this watch, you know it’s one of a pair.”

“Right,” Cerise said. She did know that. “But the odds of getting both together—”

Tanya turned the clock, so that Cerise could see the front of it, and see what Tanya was doing. She was setting it manually, with her delicate tool. Tanya paused her work for a minute, and when she did, Cerise looked up to see that Tanya was looking at her. “I know where the second watch is. I’ve already made the arrangements with the private seller. I’ve just been waiting to receive it. It should be arriving sometime next week.”

Cerise stared blankly— she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The two watches hadn’t been sold together, let alone in the same place as each other, for a very long time.

“But, if you want to split up the set…” Tanya said, with a shrug, and then turned back to her tinkering. “Then I can sell you that watch today. But if someone comes in before you come back, I’ll sell the second watch to them. I’ll only hold the second watch if I can hold it as part of a pair with that first one; which means you can’t buy today. I’ll give you a discount, too, for buying the two together. But you’re eager to buy that watch, right? Hand it back so I can wrap it for you, and I’ll ring you up.”

Cerise had wanted nothing more than to buy the watch she now held— but she’d never imagined in her wildest dreams that she could have this one and its twin together. There was no question for her. “No,” she said. “No, hold it until the other comes in. That’s what I want— both of them together. They belong together.”

“Then just pass it back over to me,” Tanya said, turning something inside the clockworks again and shifting the hand over.

Cerise hesitated.

“You don’t want to, do you?” Tanya guessed, without even looking up to Cerise. “You really do have an appreciation for that watch. You feel, on a primal level, that it is already yours. You don’t want to give it up to me.”

Cerise said nothing— because Tanya was right, and the fact that Tanya could be right like that, about her, was disconcerting, and she didn’t know how to respond to it.

“It just feels so right, to hold that weight in the palm of your hand. Like a missing piece of you has been restored. I won’t be so cruel as to take it from you, now, if you’re not ready to part with it. You can stand there and hold it for as long as you need. You don’t have to pass it back to me until you’re ready. But why don’t you step closer, and watch what I’m doing here, while you wait.”

It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, and the mantelpiece clock Tanya was manipulating was at least a real functional clock unlike the strange art pieces behind Cerise. Cerise stepped right to the counter, to get a better look. She could see right inside the clockworks, and could see where Tanya’s tool was carefully adjusting them.

“This isn’t just like any other mantelpiece clock,” Tanya volunteered. “You can set it to chime an alarm. That’s what I’m doing. I thought I would set it for twenty minutes from now, because I thought something special was going to happen then. But that’s changed— I think I only need to set the chime two minutes ahead. Things have progressed much faster than planned.”

Cerise wanted to ask what was supposed to be happening in two minutes, but her eyes were caught up in the clockwork, and she couldn’t pull her focus back out of it to ask. The pieces were so intricate, so delicate and small, and Tanya so patiently plied them with her tool. Her hand was as steady as a shelf as she worked.

“Do you like watching me set the clock?” She asked Cerise, conversationally. Cerise couldn’t seem to look up, but felt that Tanya’s eyes were on her again, so she nodded. It was true, surprisingly— the work was oddly fascinating, in the same bizarre way it had been captivating to consider the misshapen clocks. “I can set the time to anything— I’m choosing to set the alarm for just two minutes ahead, but I know how to work clocks like this. I could set the time to anything; I could set the chime for any minute. I know how to take a clock like this apart, and put it back together. I know how to completely break it down, and then set it back up. I think I could take your mind apart and put it back together just as easily.”

The abrupt shift in topic almost threw Cerise, but the lull of Tanya’s voice didn’t waver, and it held Cerise steady. There was something wrong… with what Tanya had said, but Cerise couldn’t seem to figure out what it was.

“I could tell from the way you stood looking at my clocks— I could tell how suggestible you were, how open your mind would be to my tinkering. I’ve already got you most of the way under my influence, and by the time the chime rings, you’ll be completely under my power. But you don’t need to worry about that, now— it feels good to break down, doesn’t it Cerise?” (To which Cerise could only wordlessly nod, again). “And I promise to put you all back together again, when I’m done. I’m very good at fixing the things I break.”

Cerise could still only stare at the clock. Tanya had apparently finished setting it, because she had put the clock face back into place. Now, Cerise was only watching the second hand go through its cycle. It seemed to be dragging through time— and yet each tick of the hand seemed to completely consume Cerise’s mind. Somehow it was taking an eternity. And even though Cerise knew that something… something bad would happen when the hands had gone all the way through their cycles a few times, she couldn’t help but be inpatient for it.

“I set the clock to the speed of your enslavement,” Tanya was saying again, though Cerise couldn’t understand her. “I’m thinking now that I set it too slow— I think you were even further along than my modified projections had me believe. It must feel like an eternity for you— I do apologize for that. Just a few seconds more, now—”

Tanya said that, but it felt like minutes, it felt like hours, it felt like days passed as the hand on the clock inched forward. Cerise watched with baited breath, praying it would move faster and let her out of the limbo she found herself suspended in.

At last, Cerise heard the chime of the clock, and she didn’t understand how, but it filled her body with the deepest sense of peace she’d ever known. It emptied her mind completely. She let out a sigh.

“There,” Tanya said. “I have you now, don’t I?”

Cerise couldn’t respond to that. Tanya went on speaking, but her voice was slipping out of focus, and the entire room was following it. Time had stopped for her, or else ceased to exist entirely— It had broken down. She was frozen in amber— she had strayed into eternity, stepped out of time, and the world was somewhere very far away, going on without her. It could run on for centuries and eons without her— she was outside the time stream, now.

She would still exist in a thousand years, in ten thousand. She would still be exactly where she stood now, in this feeling. The feeling was eternal. It would never end.

A voice was calling her back; she didn’t want to go, but knew she had to listen. It was inviting her to step back into linearity again, and she had to. But the feeling had shifted something in her— she could feel it as an undercurrent still running through her being.

“Well,” Tanya said, “Thank you for coming in. I think you’re ready to give back the watch, don’t you?”

Cerise found she was, and passed it to Tanya with no issue.

“I won’t be so cruel as to keep you separated from it when you don’t want to be. Anytime you like you can come back and ask to hold it for awhile, while we wait for the second watch to arrive.” Cerise was nodding along with Tanya’s words. She was already thinking of the next day… perhaps she could find time to come back… and maybe, just maybe, the second watch would take longer than expected to deliver.

As she said her goodbyes, and stepped back out into the street, she found she was almost hoping that would be the case.