22 Apr Seven Past the End

Part I

It was still dark when they arrived, though the sky to the east had begun to suggest the approach of dawn. Waverly Hollow Asylum loomed ahead like a broken stone crown, its silhouette jagged with rusted fencing that twisted upward like iron thorns. The team’s van idled just long enough for Gwen to kill the ignition and mutter under her breath.

“Looks smaller in the photos.”

From the backseat, Max leaned forward and peered past her through the windshield. “That’s because you haven’t seen the west wing,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”

Sara didn’t respond. She was already unstrapping the Pelican case from the floor and hoisting it out of the van, her camera slung low across her shoulder. As she stepped into the cold, her breath briefly fogged the air before disappearing. Gwen followed her with practiced ease, her eyes scanning the upper windows for signs of movement—whether wildlife or squatters. The building had been sealed for nearly thirty years, but the padlock on the main entrance looked much newer than expected.

Waverly Hollow had once been considered the crown jewel of state-run psychiatric care in the early 1900s. By the middle of the century, it was already under investigation for experimental practices of questionable legality, and by the early 1980s, it had been shuttered entirely. Most of its history had been buried under bureaucratic red tape and missing documentation. One story, however, had managed to survive.

Patient 707.

There was no name—only a number. No photographs existed, just fragmented intake paperwork and a persistent rumor: that every clock within the asylum—electric, analog, wind-up, or digital—had frozen at exactly 7:07 the night Patient 707 disappeared. According to the official records, the patient had died during a facility-wide power outage. But the stories whispered something stranger. Something that had remained unearthed.

Gwen retrieved her laminated entry sheet from her jacket and held it up for the security guard standing near the rust-streaked doors. He gave it a cursory glance before unlocking the entrance with an audible sigh.

“Suit yourself,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t stay long. Place doesn’t like company.”

No one laughed.

Inside, the atmosphere shifted immediately. The temperature dropped sharply, far colder than it should have been for the time of year. It wasn’t just the chill, though—it was the stillness, the unnatural quiet that pressed in from every direction. Gwen swept her flashlight across the interior, illuminating peeling green paint, rust-streaked walls near a collapsed radiator, and one of the infamous clocks: a square-faced unit mounted high, its black hands frozen at 7:07. Supposedly, it hadn’t worked in decades. She assumed as much.

Max stepped past her, already holding up the EMF detector, which blinked with inconsistent bursts even as he moved it through empty air.

“Okay, that’s weird,” he muttered. “No power here. No live wiring. No interference. But I’m getting spikes. Gwen, come look at this.”

Sara raised her camera. “Hold it steady. I want that spooky little meter in the shot.”

While they focused on the equipment, Gwen turned her attention to the building’s layout. The main hall’s floor remained intact, though the dust had curled in uneven lines, as if something had recently been dragged across it. Her gaze shifted upward.

More clocks.

All of them stuck on 7:07.

“All right,” Gwen said. “Let’s set up base camp in the records room like we planned. Sara, grab your exterior B-roll while there’s still some ambient light left. Max, I want the parabolic mic placed near the first-floor stairwell. If there’s anything residual in this building, we’re most likely to detect it below ground.”

“Ten bucks says you’re hoping for poltergeist,” Max replied. “I’m still betting on lead paint hallucinations.”

“No such luck,” Gwen said. “This place is clean. Stripped of everything but the past.”

Sara glanced at her briefly but said nothing. She was already halfway down the corridor, her camera humming quietly as she walked into the silence.

* * * * * *

It took them an hour to finish setting up the recording gear. Max cursed when the magnetic compass clipped to his jacket spun erratically, then again when his backup batteries for the field recorder drained unexpectedly. He glanced at his watch.

7:07 AM.

He tapped the screen, expecting a refresh. Nothing changed.

“Gwen?” he called out. “You said you synced all our timecodes last night, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because mine’s frozen at 7:07, and my phone’s locked up. I just restarted this thing an hour ago.”

Gwen frowned and pulled out her own phone. Same problem. No signal. No time progression.

7:07 AM.

She checked the satellite tracker in the gear pack. It, too, displayed 7:07.

“I don’t like this,” she said quietly. “Not this early into the investigation.”

Sara returned a few minutes later, visibly unsettled. She dropped the camera case near the laptop and crouched down to remove the SD card from her rig.

“I recorded your intro monologue upstairs,” she said, her voice unusually low. “It ran about five minutes. I watched the red light the whole time. There were no interruptions.”

Gwen didn’t like her tone. “And?”

Sara loaded the file. The video displayed Gwen in the upper hallway, lit by a single lantern. She spoke directly to the camera.

“This is Gwen Marcus with Hollow Earth Investigations. We are currently inside Waverly Hollow Asylum, time-stamped at—”

The footage glitched. A jarring stutter distorted Gwen’s voice, and her face flickered into static before freezing in a single frame. She stood perfectly still, staring directly into the lens. Her eyes had turned completely black.

Timecode: 7:07:07.

Max recoiled from the screen. “What the hell was that?”

Sara shook her head. “I didn’t cut. That was one continuous take.”

“Pull another file,” Gwen said, her throat suddenly dry. “Try any of the exterior shots.”

Sara complied, selecting a clip of the western façade. At first, it appeared normal—wind stirring the dry branches, the building’s skeletal outline caught in early light. Then, three seconds in, a new frame abruptly inserted itself into the feed: an interior hallway shot, poorly lit and out of focus, as if filmed by someone else.

In the center of the frame, Sara appeared. She was walking slowly down the corridor, alone.

Moments later, she collapsed. Her body hit the floor as though her strings had been cut.

The footage ended.

Timecode: 7:07:07.

* * * * * *

That night, the team set up sleeping arrangements in the records room, each taking turns on shift. At some point during her rest, Gwen awoke to a silence so profound it made her ears ring.

Max was sitting upright, staring into the dark.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I keep hearing it.”

“Hearing what?”

“The ticking,” he whispered. “It’s coming from underneath.”

Gwen listened but heard nothing. Still, she could not ignore what they had seen.

Every clock. Every recording. Every device.

All frozen at the same moment in time.

The moment that refused to pass.

Seven past the end.

Part II

When Gwen opened her eyes, the silence struck her first. There were no birds outside, no wind brushing against the shattered panes, and no sound from the two sleeping bags beside her, where Max and Sara had been just hours earlier.

The second thing she noticed was the time.

Her watch read 7:07 AM.

She sat up abruptly and scanned the room. Max sat against the far wall, fully dressed, examining something on the portable soundboard. Sara stood by the door, her arms crossed, her jaw visibly tense. Neither had touched the ration packs Gwen had set aside the previous night.

“Did either of you sleep?” she asked.

Sara remained silent. Max looked up slowly, startled, as though he hadn’t noticed Gwen was awake until that moment.

“I think so,” he said hesitantly. “But I don’t remember lying down. It feels like one moment it was midnight, and then suddenly it was morning. There weren’t any dreams. No transition. Just… here.”

Gwen retrieved her phone and checked it again. The screen remained frozen at 7:07. She restarted it. Nothing changed.

“We need to keep moving,” she said, her tone steady. “The sub-basement is the only area we haven’t logged, and if something down there is affecting our equipment, it’s where we’ll find answers.”

Sara immediately shook her head. “I’m not going back. I saw the west hallway last night. Something’s wrong with it. It looks too clean. Like that part of the building isn’t aging with the rest.”

“We agreed to document the entire site. If we leave now, all of this will have been for nothing.”

Sara’s voice cracked. “You saw that footage. That was me—dead on the floor like it already happened. That wasn’t a glitch.”

Max stood, rubbing his temples. His eyes were red, but alert. “She’s right about the footage. I reviewed it again after you fell asleep. It wasn’t just her clip. All of the recordings—every single one longer than seven minutes—have been wiped and overwritten with static. Even the backups.”

“That’s not possible,” Gwen said, though her voice lacked conviction.

“I checked every setting. Overwrite protection was on. Even the analog tapes we brought glitched out right at the seven-minute mark.”

“Maybe we’re dealing with electromagnetic damage,” she offered. “Some kind of residual energy stored in the structure.”

Max shook his head. “That doesn’t explain a loop.”

She couldn’t argue with that. Instead, she grabbed her lantern, adjusted her headset, and moved toward the stairwell. Max followed without a word. After a few seconds of hesitation, Sara fell into step behind them.

The entrance to the sub-basement was sealed behind a rusted door near the administrative wing. Gwen took out the bolt cutters and snapped the latch with a clean break. Beyond it, a narrow stairwell descended into darkness. The steps were uneven and coated in soot, and the air immediately shifted around them.

As they descended, the temperature dropped not gradually, but all at once. It felt like stepping into a room that had been refrigerated and then forgotten.

At the base of the stairs, Gwen swept her lantern across the corridor. The tiles were cracked but intact, the walls streaked with mildew and age. Most of the signage had deteriorated or peeled away, but one door still bore a faint stencil beneath a layer of grime: 707.

It appeared to be a patient wing. Four cells lined either side of the hall, each secured with a heavy metal door. The observation windows had long since shattered, and the hinges groaned when Gwen pushed one open. Inside the room stood a cot, bolted to the wall, with a torn leather restraint harness dangling loosely from one side. There was no dust on the mattress.

The walls inside were covered in scratches—deep etchings carved directly into the plaster. No ink. No paint. Just one sentence, repeated in a trembling hand:

I am still here. I am still here. I am still here.

The message curled around corners and doubled back on itself, the writing growing more erratic and frenzied with each line. In the far corner, beneath the bedframe, a thin smear of dried blood trailed upward along the wall.

Max positioned the motion camera just outside the doorway and adjusted it on the tripod. When he powered it on, the monitor feed blinked to life. For a brief moment, it showed only the empty hallway.

Then the screen cut to black.

No one had touched the controls.

The image returned, but the angle had shifted slightly. The timestamp in the corner read: 7:07:07.

And in the center of the frame stood Max—older by decades. His face was deeply lined, his hair bleached white, and his mouth hung open in a soundless scream. He staggered forward, grasping at the walls with trembling fingers, and then collapsed. His body writhed in seizure-like convulsions for several seconds before the feed abruptly snapped back to the live hallway view.

There was no one there.

Max stumbled away from the monitor. His chest rose and fell with visible strain. “That… that was me. That was me.”

Gwen steadied her voice. “It could be a temporal projection. We’ve seen this kind of bleed-through in places where the timeline’s been fractured.”

Sara backed slowly down the corridor, her hands trembling. “No. I’m done. I don’t care what explanation you come up with. That thing knew him. It knew us. That’s not just a phenomenon—it’s a presence.”

The hallway lights flickered. When Gwen turned toward the stairwell, it was gone.

In its place was another corridor—identical in design, identical in decay. Four more doors. Four more cells. The same stenciled number. The same chilling silence.

They ran.

Each door they passed looked the same. Each detail repeated itself with eerie precision. The deeper they moved, the more distorted everything became. Floors began to slope at strange angles. Shadows lengthened where there should have been none. Time had stopped behaving in any linear sense, and space seemed to warp alongside it.

Max stumbled. Gwen caught him by the arm and pulled him upright. His face had lost its color, and when he looked at her, his eyes were glazed.

“I can’t keep up,” he said hoarsely. “My joints hurt. My hands are shaking. Look.”

He held them up. The skin on his knuckles had grown translucent and thin. Liver spots mottled the backs of his hands, and his fingernails had yellowed. He looked like he had aged twenty years in twenty minutes.

Eventually, they found another stairwell—one that appeared intact—and climbed it without hesitation. Their footsteps echoed unnaturally, the sounds bending as though bouncing through a cavern. When they burst back into the records room, Sara slammed the door behind them and shoved one of the storage crates in front of it.

Max collapsed into the chair by the laptop and turned to face the cracked mirror mounted above the desk. He stared at his reflection in stunned silence.

“My hair’s turning gray,” he said finally, his voice distant.

Gwen stepped closer. Half of his hair had turned silver, and deep creases had appeared at the corners of his mouth. His appearance had shifted in the span of less than an hour.

Whatever force governed Waverly Hollow was not content to observe them from a distance.

It had begun rewriting them from the inside out.

Part III 

Max remained silent for a long time. He sat beneath the wall-mounted mirror, studying his reflection with the detached interest of someone viewing a stranger. His expression did not register alarm or confusion—only curiosity, as though he were watching something gradually fade from recognition.

When he finally moved, he brought one trembling hand to his mouth. Pressing his fingertips against his gums, he drew them away again, revealing a thin smear of blood. A molar, dulled and yellowed with age, clinked softly against the floor tiles.

Gwen knelt beside him to check his pulse and pupils. His skin felt cool but not clammy. His breathing had slowed, but remained steady.

“I feel like I’ve lived a year in the last hour,” he murmured. “My knees ache. My joints are locking. I keep forgetting what I’m doing. Just now, I couldn’t remember whether I turned the recorder off or if I never started it.”

Sara stood by the boarded-up window, checking her phone again. It still displayed 7:07. Even after restarting it twice and removing the battery, the numbers remained frozen.

“This place is consuming us,” she said flatly. “We need to leave. Now.”

“We tried,” Gwen reminded her. “We walked out through the main entrance, and it brought us back here.”

Sara turned to face her. Her expression was hard, her jaw clenched. “Then we try again. Whatever is happening, we can’t stay here and let it finish the job.”

Max attempted to stand, but his knees buckled beneath him. Gwen caught him under the arm, but had to support most of his weight. His hair had grown noticeably thinner. Pale scalp showed through where it hadn’t just an hour earlier.

Without another word, the three of them began repacking their gear. Gwen moved quickly, checking batteries and camera housings. Sara resecured the laptops and data drives. Max did what he could, though he clearly struggled to stay upright. When they reached the corridor, Gwen noticed something off about the daylight beyond the entryway.

It appeared brighter, almost overly vibrant, but disturbingly still—fixed in place like the backdrop of a stage. The rusted double doors, previously locked with a modern padlock, now stood wide open.

Sara passed through them first.

What lay beyond was not the gravel path or the overgrown lawn. It was the lobby of Waverly Hollow again. The room matched the original in shape and size, but the decay had deepened. Mold sagged from the ceiling, and the chandelier above the reception desk had shattered, leaving only frayed wires swaying in a room without wind.

Max groaned quietly. “It’s the same place. But worse.”

Gwen turned a slow circle, examining every detail. “It’s not the same. It’s another layer.”

They stepped backward through the threshold. The doors slammed shut behind them, sealing with a metallic click. No one had touched the handles.

The air changed again. The chill no longer felt like natural cold—it felt invasive, as though the building itself had drawn in a breath and stolen warmth from their bodies in the process.

“We’re caught in a loop,” Gwen said. Her voice was calm, but it carried the weight of certainty. “It’s not only time that’s repeating. It’s everything. The walls. The halls. Every object. Every surface. It’s copying itself like a virus, and each new version is more degraded than the last.”

Sara glanced down at her camera and frowned. The device had begun recording on its own. She tapped the screen and scanned the footage.

“This isn’t from me,” she said slowly. “I didn’t hit record. This file shouldn’t exist.”

She pressed play. The video depicted the records room, identical in layout and decor, but the people inside were not the same. It showed Gwen, Sara, and Max arranged differently—each of them visibly injured. Gwen’s right hand was missing. Sara had blood streaked across her jaw. Max’s hair had turned entirely gray, his face drawn and hollow. His mouth moved in a silent scream, though no sound accompanied it.

The clip ended with a familiar timestamp.

7:07:07.

“I never recorded that,” Sara whispered. “That hasn’t happened.”

“It will,” Gwen replied. “Or it already has. This place is a parasitic, cycling through failed timelines. Versions of us that didn’t make it out. It’s documenting them.”

She turned toward the back of the room. “We need to find something we missed. Something outside the replication pattern.”

Sara hesitated. “What could exist outside of this?”

Gwen didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, she began tearing through the old furniture and dislodged wall panels. After several minutes of searching, she found what she was looking for: a narrow hollow behind one of the filing cabinets, sealed with warped plywood that crumbled under pressure. Inside was a bundle wrapped in discolored cloth. She peeled it away carefully.

A notebook lay inside.

Its pages were fused in places from moisture and age, but enough remained intact to read. On the front cover, in slanted, fading handwriting, were the words:

707 – Observations

Gwen sat down and opened it cautiously. The ink had faded to brown. The entries were mostly undated, and some had begun to disintegrate along the spine. A few passages were coherent. Others spiraled into disjointed scrawl, as though the writer’s grip on language had decayed over time.

“The orderlies said the clocks didn’t need to tick. But I can still hear them. They tick behind my eyes. Inside the bones.”

“They told me the experiment was already in progress. That I had agreed. That I had signed. But I don’t remember signing anything.”

“It isn’t time that’s broken. It’s the hour. Something is wrong with the hour. Seven past the end. Seven past the end. Seven past the end.”

“I gave time my name. Now it wears my face.”

Gwen lowered the notebook slowly. Across the room, Max began muttering something under his breath.

“Say that again?” she asked.

Max blinked. “What?”

“You just said something.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t.”

Sara had heard it too. “You said, ‘I gave time my name.’ Just like the journal.”

Max’s face drained of color. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Read this,” Gwen said, passing him the notebook.

Max took it and stared at the pages. At first, his eyes moved across the lines without comprehension. Then, without prompting, he began reading the text aloud—verbatim. He spoke with rhythmic precision, repeating entire passages, including ones Gwen had not yet read aloud.

Sara stepped back cautiously. “What is this?”

“I don’t know,” Gwen replied. “But it’s not possession. It’s resonance. He’s synchronizing.”

“Synchronizing with what?”

“Patient 707,” Gwen said. “If he existed—if this journal is his—and if time fractured around him, then whatever keeps us trapped may be feeding off continuity. Max is aligning with him. Or worse—merging.”

Max looked up. His eyes were glassy, his focus slightly off. For one brief moment, his pupils dilated far too wide, and the corners of his mouth curled upward in a twitching, broken smile.

Then the moment passed, and he sagged forward, coughing weakly.

“There’s something binding us to this place,” Gwen said, mostly to herself. “And I think it’s him. We need to find where it began. The fracture didn’t start in a hallway. It started in a room. Somewhere deeper than the sub-basement.”

Sara crossed her arms. “And if there’s no beginning to find?”

Gwen met her gaze. “Then we find the next version of it. Because if we stay here and do nothing, the next recording will show us decaying in this room.”

Outside the windows, the light never shifted.

The clocks remained frozen.

And the hour continued to break.

Part IV

The journal lay open on the floor where Max had dropped it. Its final entry trailed off mid-sentence, the lines spiraling into jagged, nonsensical loops. Gwen stared at the page for a long time before reaching down and closing the cover. The moment her fingers touched the spine, Max stirred and let out a low, rasping moan.

His body had deteriorated further. His cheeks had hollowed, and the whites of his eyes had taken on a sickly yellow hue. Each breath emerged as a wheeze, dry and shallow. When he tried to speak, his voice cracked beneath the strain of brittle vocal cords.

“He’s closer,” Max said, barely audible. “Closer than time. He’s in the hour. Beneath it. We’re not standing in minutes. We’re standing on him.”

Sara moved toward the corner of the room where she had arranged the salvaged equipment. The cables lay tangled like coils of muscle across the floor. One of the tripods buzzed softly as it finished downloading a fragment from the motion sensor cameras. Gwen joined her at the monitor.

The screen flickered, displaying unfamiliar faces—men and women none of them recognized. Some wore gear that resembled theirs. Others appeared older. A few looked barely out of high school.

Each recording lasted no more than seven minutes.

Each ended at the same timestamp.

7:07:07.

One clip showed a woman with dyed red hair walking confidently through the west hallway, speaking into a headset. Moments later, she collapsed, blood streaming from her eyes and nose as her limbs twisted into unnatural angles. Another showed a man sealing a stairwell door behind him. As he turned, a shadow overtook him, and the feed went black.

Sara’s voice broke the silence. “None of these people are us.”

Gwen did not reply. She was already packing.

“I’m going back down,” she said.

Sara turned sharply. “To where?”

“There’s something beneath the sub-basement,” Gwen said. “We missed it because the floor plans end at the foundation. But the fracture didn’t begin in a hallway. It came from a room. One they built and then tried to erase.”

“You think that’s where it started?”

“I think that’s where it ends.”

Sara stepped forward. “Then I’m going with you.”

“No,” Gwen said. “You’re staying here. You’re going to document everything that happens next. If I don’t come back—or if something that looks like me does—you’ll know what to do.”

Sara’s voice trembled. “And what exactly am I supposed to do? Record my own death?”

Gwen met her eyes without hesitation. “That’s already happened. You’ve seen the footage. But it hasn’t happened this time. That means there’s still a window—however small—for us to change something.”

Sara’s gaze dropped to the screen. A new clip had appeared. This one showed Gwen walking alone down the hallway, flashlight in hand. She paused just outside a door marked TREATMENT 3A, then vanished from frame.

There was no timestamp.

No visible injury.

Just Gwen walking into darkness.

* * * * * *

The descent took longer than expected. The stairwell to the sub-basement had shifted again. Sections of it had buckled inward. Some had collapsed entirely. Gwen moved slowly, testing each step before placing her full weight down. The air changed as she descended. It no longer merely felt cold—it felt saturated with memory, as though she were breathing in years that had never been lived.

At the lowest level, hidden behind a partially caved-in wall, Gwen discovered a narrow shaft sloping sharply downward. It had once been fitted with rails and power cables, suggesting it had served as a freight passage. She followed the path on foot, moving past rusted junction boxes and shattered lights, until it opened into a circular chamber unlike any she had seen in the rest of the asylum.

The walls were lined with clocks. Every kind from every era. Pocket watches. Grandfather clocks. Stopwatch timers. Wristwatches. Even medical monitors and old factory bells. All of them were broken. All were frozen at the same time: 7:07.

Some had melted together at the edges. Others hung from the walls like artifacts fused into place by pressure or heat. In the center of the room stood a rotted medical chair, ringed by steel restraints and surrounded by used syringes. Behind it hung a large mirror, the glass cracked and darkened by age.

Gwen stepped in front of it—and saw nothing.

No reflection appeared. Not even a shimmer of her flashlight. Just void.

The mirror refused to acknowledge her presence. It did not fail because she wasn’t there. It failed because something else was. Something that no longer needed her image.

She raised her camera and began recording.

“If this footage survives,” she said, her voice low but steady, “this is Gwen Marcus with Hollow Earth Investigations. I am standing beneath the lowest level of Waverly Hollow Asylum. I believe I’ve reached the origin of the time fracture. This room is the source. Patient 707 was restrained here. And whatever happened to him—it didn’t end when his body did.”

She turned to face the chair.

“I believe the loop sustains itself through identity—through continuity. Each new cycle feeds the structure. Every replication overwrites the last. But someone must remain behind to keep it spinning.”

Gwen climbed into the chair and pulled the restraints over her wrists. They clicked into place with a reluctant but final snap. The metal was cold but still functional after all these years.

“This time,” she whispered, “we’ll finish the hour.”

The camera captured the faintest shimmer of movement in the mirror—just a ripple along its surface—before static overtook the feed.

* * * * * *

Sara woke in the records room, alone.

The sleeping bags were gone. Max was gone. Gwen was gone. All of the gear had vanished. Her camera, fully charged the night before, now displayed a drained battery icon. The lights had gone out. The air felt stagnant.

She sat up slowly and took in the clocks on the wall.

All of them read 7:07.

Sara rose to her feet and called out, but her voice caught in her throat. No one answered.

She opened the hallway door and found herself looking down the west corridor—the one with the identical cells. She turned back, expecting to find the records room behind her, but it had been replaced by the front lobby.

Then, a moment later, by the sub-basement stairs.

Each door she opened became the next part of the asylum. The layout spiraled without logic. Her bearings dissolved. Her footsteps echoed strangely—sometimes delayed, sometimes too fast. She descended, searching for an exit, but instead found herself back in the hallway that led to Cell 707.

The lights above her buzzed once, then flickered.

A camera activated nearby.

Its lens locked onto her, recording silently as she walked down the corridor. Her steps were slow, her posture cautious. She paused halfway to study something smeared along the wall—a faint line of blood, old but still red.

She moved closer.

The camera held on her for six more seconds.

Then—

7:07:07.

The screen turned to static.

And over that silence, drawn from a forgotten recording, Gwen’s voice whispered across the void:

“This time, we’ll finish the hour.”