Tick Tick Tick

                                                                       The group felt chills as they stepped onto the soaking step of the mansion. On this raining day, they had been called by their journalism professor to work on a case study for the final assignment, but they were half wishing that they had just kept their mouths shut and just chose another subject in the field to write a thesis on. The other half felt ecstatic at being the ones chosen to solve the mystery in their hometown that no one had been able to crack. At the flash of lightning, they tried to recollect the events of the case, while sheltering under the terrace of the weathered mansion. It was all surrounded around a clock.

                                                                        In Ashley Manor, there lay a wooden cuckoo clock no one knew its whereabouts of. It was hung up in the elaborate hall, the chandelier's glass shards reflecting light upon it. For years, it remained silent and the family living there at the time doubted whether it actually worked, but decided as a whole to leave it there, just because it looked pretty, with its paisley paint design, ridged roof to make the clock look like a house and thirteen golden chimes at the bottom. It just stayed there, undisturbed. Until the fateful day of October the 13rd, which had turned out to be a Friday that year. It suddenly started chiming loudly, a total of 13 times. The maid had cocked her head that day, visibly confused. Why? Simply because there were only twelve numbers on the face of a clock, not thirteen. She pondered over this for an entire day, until she entered the drawing room of the mansion. She screamed. The master of the house was found dead, stabbed with one of the clock's hands. But when the maid ran to check the clock, it still had two hands. Lifting her skirts, she ran out of the mansion to report to the police, when the cursed clock played its mournful note, for thirteen times once again. The next thing she knew, she felt a stabbing pain in her back and dropped down dead. There was only one witness: a policeman, who after identifying who the woman was, investigated her workplace and found the clock with two hands once again. Mystified, he called an entire team to help him, when for the third time that day, it chimed again and all but one of the police force died. The one which escaped with his life headed towards the town and warned the villagers to never step inside Ashley Manor, because all who dared venture nose first in the case, was found dead a few hours later.

                                                                             The quadruple-membered group, of course, being young and naïve, did not listen to the benevolent warnings of the people of their hometown. They had watched multiple hours of Scooby Doo in their childhood, they had a wealth of education to support them, and frankly, the idea that a clock, an inanimate object, could murder, was all round ridiculous. And they were here to prove it. The most daring of them, a girl named Nathalie rang the bell, a knob on a slab of mahogany. It sounded with a deafening organ-like triad of notes. Covering their ears, they almost did not hear the creak with which the door had slanted open. Staring at each other, very obviously freaked out, they stood behind Nathalie and reaching a foot out, they tiptoed inside their (unfortunately) desired location.

                                                                           They were mostly relieved that they were under a dry roof, but now they had to face their biggest challenge yet: solving the unsolvable mystery of why the clock and the murders were connected. They peered around every corner, with one of the boys, Damien, tapping the walls for a secret passage. The others rolled their eyes knowing his obsession with tropes of mystery novels that simply did not occur in real life. They ignored him for a while, until they heard a bang, kind of like a wooden plank hitting stone. And that's exactly what it was. For once, Damien's dream came true and there really was a secret passage. It was directly under the clock, so it raised the suspicions of the ragtag group. They were about to descend down the stairs to investigate, when Rachael, the girly girl and scaredy cat of the group, suggested in her meek voice that it would be more convenient to investigate if they split up. They stared at her in shock.