Time in a Bottle

From: Vana Lee (savanapeterson297@hotmail.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Minnesota
Source: Form Submission

When I was smaller, my cousins and I used to snoop around in our grandma's attic to find old clothes and antiques and whatnot. We would find old hippie clothes, old lamps and dresses, old guitars and records, and old bottles.

One rainy day we rummaged around in the attic chests and found a box of old whiskey bottles. One specific bottle caught my eye. It wasn't the normal brown glass color, it was almost the color you get when you see a bubble, only it was black. Pitch black. And the little waves in the glass were moving. There was another thing that grabbed my attention. There was a note in the bottle.

I was reaching in for the bottle, but the bottle flew up in the air and then landed on the floor with a dull, glassy thud. I wanted to run but something made me stay kneeling on the attic floor. It was then when I noticed my cousins had disappeared. Then a cold grasp on my wrist directed my hand towards the bottle and I touched the almost searing hot glass surface. I took the hard cork from the top and tried to dig out the note. But before I could get a hold on the paper, purpleish blue smoke started pouring out of the bottle, like dry ice.

I looked frantically around for some sort of flashlight or something, so I went to open the window, but a ghostly figure stood in front of the window. It was a man, appearing to stand sadly with his head hung to one side. He was dressed in an old black suit, and his appearance was transparent with a purple tinge. He took a pocketwatch from his inner coat and gazed at it, and then threw it in a direction towards the window. The pocketwatch disappeared. I turned and went back to the bottle and saw the note jutting out of the top. The words scrawled onto the note were hard to read, but I understood enough to know it was a suicide note. The note read something like this: If in case you find me dead, blame it on no one but myself. I have turned time against myself, and so I must rid myself of it than to go on living with it endlessly drilling into my mind. It was signed: Charles F. Darcy.

I dropped the note and seemed to collapse. I then fainted, I think. I regained conciousness and I saw my cousins standing over me, petrified. They later said I was looking at a new bottle we found and then I went into a sleepy trance until I collapsed. My grandma was standing on the ladder of the entrance of the attic, worried sick. I assured them I was fine, but I didn't tell them what I saw, for I was afraid that I would scare them. I haven't ever told them. But last week, I was driving through an old part of a city in Minnesota, I saw something gleaming on the side of the road. It was the black bottle. There was a note in it that I didn't have to read. Now, the bottle was ticking, like there was a watch running inside. I carefully picked up the bottle and hurled it over a bridge nearby. I still can't stop hearing a watch ticking in my mind, echoing inside a glass case.