Spooky Tales

The Minute Man Ritual

A/N: random flash of pain induced inspiration.

Plot: the rules to The Minute Man game. Would you survive?

Warnings: mentions of ageing, death, maybe some existential dread.

Listen to the narration by TheCreepyVerse here: https://youtu.be/g9gBnTf7d9o

There's a game that you can play which will see how well you can survive in a minute. But there's a catch; if you do the ritual correctly it skews either your perception of time or time itself. Nobody really knows for sure which.

It's called 'The Minute Man' and the idea sounds very simple; survive one minute. You turn off all the lights and sit in a quiet room and at exactly 3AM you light six candles and chant for one minute.

"Minute Man, Minute Man, won't you play?
Come in, come in, won't you stay?
Minute Man, Minute Man, we want to see,
How long it really takes for us to be free."

Then you open a door. Any door of any size.

Each of the six candles represent 10 seconds in the minute. If The Minute Man has entered, the flames will turn an intense red and will stay lit regardless of any breeze; they will extinguish one by one after ten seconds each.

Again this sounds so simple but the game messes with time in some way. Nobody knows whether time actually changes or you just think it does. So during this one minute; starting at 3:01AM time has the chance of passing very quickly, if you're really lucky, and the minute will be over with and you've won and you're free - though the chances of this are almost nil.
However if you're very unlucky time will pass excruciatingly slowly and you'll be forever dodging traps, playing puzzles and working out riddles while working towards your objective.

Wherever you decide to play this game, and I hope for your sake you've chosen an enclosed space such as a house, it will go dark and the lights will intermittently short out, overheat or just cease to work. Flashlights are not affected by this as such but make sure you have batteries on hand in case it mysteriously runs out of power. The rooms of your house will seem to grow in size; your normal sized living room is now the size of a field, the stairs to your first floor are now never ending. Time and space are your enemy and friend - use them wisely and to your advantage.
If you decided to start this game outside, then you may as well resign yourself to losing the overall game...

The objective, as well as playing his games, is to see the time.

You'll look at your wrist because you always wear a watch and it will be able to tell you the time and hey presto done! But it won't be there, your phone won't be in your pocket, the clock on the kitchen wall will have no hands and the digital clock on the oven will flash with four zeros - no matter where you look; they'll error or be broken, missing.
The only way to see the time is by looking at The Minute Man's pocket watch which he carries inside his dark overcoat. He'll be clever at keeping it hidden, so to see it will need you to be smart enough to trick him into showing you - which, I'm sorry to say is almost impossible, I don't care how much of a child prodigy you are or what your IQ is; he is smarter than you. Or you have to find a way to view the face of his watch without him knowing; I'm not telling you exactly how to achieve this... but mirrors, projections and misdirection have been successful in the past.

The point of his games, his riddles and puzzles, is to keep you mentally busy enough that you don't have a chance to see the watch face. He will give plenty of opportunities to you, they'll be fleeting but many and he's relying on your lack of mental capacity to multitask to that degree. He'll give you riddles with multiple answers to make you second guess yourself.

"The ages of a father and son add up to 66; the father's age is that of the son but reversed. How old are they?"

You may be panicking but time and space? They'll help you with clues. They won't be obvious clues; the clock on the kitchen wall has a 15 minute section filled in. There will be 24 swirls on the wallpaper pattern. 6 lights on the ground floor. There will be clues; all is not lost.

He'll play hide and seek with you; a simple childhood game in theory but this is no normal game. To an entity who can see all and be anywhere; how can you truly hide from him? The idea is to be creative and to remember that space isn't working the same way as it should; there's no rules. That couch you're standing by? Try crawling under what looks to be only an inch gap. The cupboard under the sink? The pile of dirty laundry on your bedroom floor? Think outside the box. However... try to stay away from refrigerators, freezers and ovens... for some rather obvious reasons. Of course you could always try to play the clown and hide behind a long curtain with just your feet showing; The Minute Man does have a sense of humour, of sorts.

During these games you will age at a steady rate; if they take you twenty years you will age twenty years. Ten seconds really could kill you.

If all your candles go out before you see the time; you win (however this could very well take an actual lifetime).

If you see the time from The Minute Man's watch face; you win (and though not easy, this is guaranteed to end the whole game returning you back to where your candles have now melted down to nothing and it's as if only that one minute has passed.)

What do you get for winning, exactly? The Minute Man will offer to tell you the exact date and time of death of someone you personally know. You can of course decline without prejudice and that will be the end of the game. If you choose to take him up on his offer he will simply give you a date and time. For example - Wednesday the 13th of September 2045 at 04:26 AM. He will tell you nothing more; no name or clue to who this date refers and then the game is over.

So what happens if neither of these things happen? What happens if you answer a riddle wrong? Don't finish a puzzle? Lose too many games of hide and seek? What if you die in this place?

The Minute Man gets to keep you. You're now going to forever roam in the place that was created for the game. It's your prison now and there's no way of buying yourself out or trading your place with someone else; your new reality features rooms that go on forever, stairs that never end, a hunger you can never fill, a thirst so bad you could drink a lake dry and nothing to make it go away. You will never sleep, never pass out into unconsciousness. Whatever state your body was in when your luck ran out is how you now exist in this place.

And before you can get too 'comfortable' - this state of being but not - the minute man will carefully and meticulously erase every trace of you ever existing from the minds, lives, photographs, videos and phones of those you know and love, any person you ever met or waved at. Not one person will ever remember you in any way.

He will make sure you watch his work before leaving you to your eternity with 6 forever burning candles that never melt and a blank watch face that will never tell the time.

So let me ask you; do you have a minute to spare...?

(Riddle answer; 51 & 15 / OR 42 & 24 / OR 60 & 06)