When the Clock Stops

He had died five times. The first four times, the Ghost Clock had stopped time, and his deaths had coincidentally fallen right on the points where time rewound. Each death was only a reset. The fifth time, the Faceless Ghost twisted his head off ahead of schedule. The rules of the two ghosts collided violently, and the loop collapsed. The Ghost Clock's second hand accidentally pierced his body and became one with him. He survived, carrying a power no living person should possess: the ability to stop time. First he could stop time for himself, then for a target, and finally rewind an entire area. He thought this was his ticket to survival, only to realize he had stepped into an even deeper, wider supernatural abyss. Every time he stopped time, it meant a ghost was waiting nearby. Every time he rewound it, it meant someone had already suffered death. He journeyed for a long time, so long he lost count of how many times he had stopped time and how often he had rewound it. From the second hand to the minute hand, then from the minute hand to the hour hand, he gradually gained the Ghost Clock's full power, drawing ever closer to an answer he dared not contemplate: if he possessed the entire Ghost Clock, could he return to the beginning? Could he return to that ordinary, unremarkable senior year of high school, before the supernatural began to revive? In the end, he found his answer. He sacrificed himself and used the Ghost Clock to rewind time to before it all began. The timeline was rewritten. The dead found peace, the living were safe, and the supernatural had never existed. He disappeared. No one remembered him. The world returned to normal, as if waking at last from a long nightmare. The second hand kept moving, but it no longer meant anything.