Uncle Nick was not the first to wear the watch, and nor was he even the first 'Uncle Nick', for it was Uncle Nick's own Uncle Nick who had passed the watch down to him along with some preposterous, rambling tale of its creation by some distant, Swiss ancestor. An absurd fantasy, swiftly forgotten, and yet the watch...
The watch - the impossible watch - was everything the cantankerous old fool had promised. A mechanism not only for telling time, but controlling it. Not stopping it, exactly, but slowing it so that seconds became years - as near as he had been able to measure it. Adjusting the environment immediately around him in subtle ways that made a mockery of the laws of physics. By rights his transgressions of time and nature should have sent relativistic shock waves racing through the matter he interacted with. Doors should have exploded into splinters at his touch, and flesh should have evaporated beneath his caressing fingertips, and gravity itself should have abandoned him to an ignominious fate.
Nothing explained it. Not the science, anyway. It had to be the power of a god, or perhaps that of Chronos himself, Titan and Lord of Time. Absurd... but how else to explain it?
It made people into playthings, dolls to be used and abused, though for the longest time he resisted such a base impulse, preferring instead to test the limits of the device. For a while he imagined himself a new Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and funding as well an extravagant lifestyle for himself. He travelled the seven seas, and explored the four corners of the world, and never lacked for the love of a woman.
But after aging twenty years in the space of five, his appetite for fresh adventure diminished at last, and he returned to England to settle down and rest - for a while, anyway.
And then his brother, Dimitri, got married.
*
It was love at first sight - at least on Nick's side. Though he had bedded many beautiful young women over the years, there was an angelic innocence about Mary, a sweetness about her, that complemented her down-to-earth, girl-next-door looks. She was an attractive blonde with bright blue eyes and full, round breasts. Indeed, a more perfect example of a buxom lass was difficult to envisage.
She only had eyes for Dimitri. Though she greeted her future brother-in-law with wary warmth, Nick understood at once that there was no hope of seducing her away and claiming her for himself. Instead, as the big day approached, his heart ached to see the lovers so entwined, stealing kisses at every opportunity, laughing at private jokes, teasing each other; and increasingly his thoughts dwelled on the watch and the opportunities its trickery could offer.
Because Mary could be his, in ways he had only ever dreamed of before. So many times he had almost given in to temptation, the bodies of time-frozen women there for the taking. Nick had prided himself on his restraint. He might be an outrageous thief, but he was a gentleman! But now, with Mary... He would have forsworn all other women for her, to have her as his own adoring wife.
It was not to be. Nick wrestled mightily with his conscience, and felt sorely tested. He had almost godlike power at his command, but what he did with Mary in his feverish imaginings was devilish rather than divine. To yield to such base desires would be to cross a terrible line. Like Eve plucking an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, he would be condemned forever.
Seeing Mary in her bridal gown, radiant and terrified as she marched up the aisle, broke something in him. He knew in that moment, his soul no longer in turmoil but almost sad, that this joyful, sacred union would soon be corrupted by his own selfish need for his brother's wife.
Stopping time mid-vows, he embraced her from behind, his hands on her corseted chest, the bulge in his trousers pressing into her soft, curtained rear. "Do you take me to be your secret love," he whispered, "to offer up your warm, sweet flesh, for as long as we both live?"
Returning to his seat - the hard wood of the pew - he offered up a prayer for forgiveness, and restarted time.
"I do," she said.
*
Inevitably, Nick had touched and even moved many people while in frozen time. His initial worries about the consequences of this had developed into a careful study. While subtle touches would seem to be dismissed without a thought, a definite change in position or shift in clothing would not go unnoticed. Sometimes people would shiver and talk of ghosts, but most would reason it away: the trick of an overactive imagination; a gust of wind; a knock from a passing stranger; something...
