Haunting Clock from Malaysia - by Ali Osman

I once owned an old wall clock which was possessed.

The clock would function normally but whence came midnight, it would stop mysteriously. All I had to do was push the pendulum to swing and it would work again - until came midnight, of course.

At first, I thought it could be the position of the hands at midnight that were brushing against each other, causing the jam. But then, at midday when the hands were in exactly the same position as midnight, the clock never stopped. I was puzzled so I decided to send the clock to my friend, Mohammed, who was a skilled watch technician. After a day, Mohammed rang me up and urged me to take the clock back.

"A strange thing happened," he said. "The clock, upon midnight, starts to 'ding-dong non stop'".

Those were his exact words. He said he had to manually stop the pendulum from swinging, to stop the clanging.

I was tickled.

The next day, when I visited Mohammed at the shop, he looked tired and jumpy.

Mohammed said in Malay, "Jam kau masuk hantu, lah" - (Your clock is possessed by an evil spirit) He advised me to throw it away, but I couldn't, it was my late father's favourite clock.

I remember the day my father brought the clock home. He was so proud of it. He hung it on the wall and dusted it everyday. He would wind it every month without fail. He never let the clock stop, not even once.

Once, when my father was sick and could not get out of bed, he made my mother take care of the clock as if it were a living thing. My mother, being a submissive woman, never objected.

Although tickled, I felt uneasy after hearing the clock was possessed, I left it unused for a couple of days. During those couple of days, my nights were sleepless. I kept dreaming of an ogre pounding a giant club against an enormous brass gong. I would wake up in a sweat, and head would hurt the entire day. I knew my dreams were related to the clock for obvious reasons – the gong.

I realised I had to do something, so I decided to take the clock to a "bomoh" (psychic). I was told of a psychic living in a rural neighbourhood nearby, so I went there without hesitance. The physic was a very old and frail woman who was said to possess powerful spiritual magic. Apparently, she knew I was coming beforehand.

She handled the clock carefully, then mumbled some unintelligible verses. She looked at me and said indeed the clock was possessed, and an angry Jinn was trapped inside it.

I asked her how the Jinn got inside the clock in the first place. She replied it was put in there by my late father. The Jinn granted my father special favours, and in return, my father must feed it and keep the clock clean, for it was its home.

My father did do what was demanded by the Jinn, but when he died, we didn't. We neglected the clock for months, and that meant the Jinn was not fed.

In retrospect, I do remember good things started to happen after my father bought the clock. My father got a pay raise, and my barren sister gave birth to a baby girl - everyone was surprised, even the doctors. Yes, it's true, many good things did happen until my father died 5 years ago.

Maybe the Jinn's resentment had something to do with my wife's miscarriage 4 months ago. I don't want to find that out.

I left the clock with the "bomoh". I didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. The memory of my father will come from my head and not from the clock.

Moral: Feed your pet tiger, always.