I am just nine when he first attacks me. As I lie in bed a man steps out of my closet, he rushes at me before I can scream and covers my mouth, then starts beating me, finally breaking my arm. I can’t see his smile because his face is covered, but I can tell that he enjoys hurting me. Then he runs inside my closet again.

As I start screaming my parents arrive with looks of horror, but they can’t find him. Nobody can, I tell the police that he has a clock for a face, but they think it’s just my imagination. It isn’t, it was a digital clock covering his eyes like a virtual reality helmet, displaying the current year, date and time.

He came back again when I was twelve and broke my other arm, then when I was eighteen and broke my leg. That was the last I saw of him so far, but I’m afraid he’ll come back.

Eventually I had a short romance with a man. We broke up, but I was pregnant and choose to keep it, even if I had to raise my son alone.

We live like recluses because of my fear that the clock man will hurt my son, so I always try to keep a close eye on him.

One day, when I look at the drawings my teenage son had been doing, I see it, he’s drawn the clock man. I ask him about it, but he claims it’s just something from his fantasy.

This has me even more scared for his safety, I forbid him from going outside as I don’t want the man to get him. Over time he grew more solitary, always staying in his room working on technology. He seemed to resent women too, perhaps because of his anger at me. He’s thirty now and still lives in my basement, but I don’t mind, it’s better than if the clock man had got him.

Today I need to go to the hospital. I knock at my son’s locked door, but he’s not answering. So I go get the spare key he doesn’t know I have. I’m sorry for intruding, but this is an emergency, and regardless of what he’s up to right now I need to tell him where I’m going.

As I open the door to the basement, I’m shocked to find it empty. He’s not here. That shouldn’t be possible, I would know if he went outside. He never wants me in here so I feel bad for snooping, but I must find out where he’s gone. I’m scared and hope the clock man hasn’t taken him.

I step around computers and start to rifle through the papers on his desk. I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.

These are the designs for a time machine.

With rising horror I realize, the man who has abused me my whole life, is my own son.