Momo stops time and the Gray Men flee

Momo stops time and the Men in Gray flee marks the sudden reversal of their pursuit: at Professor Hora’s instruction, Momo opens the doors that make the time stop possible, then watches the Men in Gray lose the resource on which their survival depends. The city freezes, but Momo can still move. With an hour-lily in her hand and Cassiopeia under her arm, she follows the surviving fugitives out of Nowhere House and toward Never Lane, turning a moment of stillness into the beginning of a chase.

Causes and Instructions

Before leaving, Professor Hora tells Momo that he is going somewhere and forbids her to follow or ask where. He explains that his sleep is no ordinary sleep and that he would rather she were not present. He gives her a specific task for after he is gone: open both the little door bearing his name and the large bronze door leading into Never Lane. Once time stops, he warns, the doors will be impossible to move. Momo confirms that she has understood and memorized his directions, but asks how she will know when the moment comes. Professor Hora assures her that she will know.

The task is exact, and its order matters. Momo first opens the small door marked with Professor Hora’s name. She then hurries along the corridor lined with statues to the large bronze front door. It is so heavy that she must exert all her strength to open it. Only after completing both steps does she run back to the great hall. Cassiopeia is in her arms as she waits to see what will happen, following the instructions without knowing what the change will feel like.

The World at a Standstill

The change arrives as a sudden jolt, but not one that shakes the ground. The narration presents it as a timequake rather than an earthquake: an unfamiliar sensation accompanied by a sound like a sigh from the depths of the ages. Then it is over. The innumerable clocks stop ticking, whirring, and chiming; pendulums halt at odd angles. A silence more profound than any before settles over the world, and time itself stands still.

Momo discovers that she is holding an hour-lily of exceptional size and beauty. She did not feel anyone place it in her hand; it simply appeared. The flower becomes the tangible sign of the new condition, while her first tentative step establishes how sharply that condition divides her from everything around her: Momo can move, but ordinary objects cannot. The remains of breakfast are still on the table, yet the little armchair will not yield beneath her. A cup holding a mouthful of chocolate cannot be moved; its contents, the honey, and even crumbs fixed to the plates are hard and immovable. Time’s stoppage has arrested the everyday world down to its smallest details.

The Men in Gray Lose Their Ground

The Men in Gray soon understand that the stillness has reached beyond Nowhere House. One disputes the possibility that an hourglass could stop, then points out that its sand is suspended in midair and that the glass itself will not budge. Another arrives with news from agents in the city: their cars, and everything else, have stopped. The report makes the consequence explicit. No time is available anywhere, their supplies have been cut off, and they identify Professor Hora as the one who has switched time off.

That realization turns their dependence into panic. The Men in Gray rush for the little door, pushing and fighting in their effort to preserve their gray lives. They jostle, trade punches, knock off one another’s hats, wrestle, and snatch cigars from each other’s mouths. When they lose their cigars, they seem to lose their strength as well. They stand with their arms outstretched, grow increasingly transparent, and vanish; nothing remains, not even their hats. The scene makes visible what the Men in Gray’s earlier confidence concealed: without a supply of time, they cannot maintain their existence.

The Pursuit Begins

Three Men in Gray remain. They duck through the small door one after another and hurry down the passage. Momo follows, holding Cassiopeia under one arm and clutching the hour-lily tightly in her free hand. Everything depends on keeping the fugitives in sight. The flower and the tortoise accompany her into the pursuit, while the three fleeing figures give her a clear, immediate objective.

By the time Momo emerges through the front door, the three have reached the mouth of Never Lane, where more smoke-wreathed Men in Gray are gathered. The newcomers see the fugitives from Nowhere House, and the flight spreads: they run too, others join them, and soon the whole group is streaming toward the city. The familiar rule that haste can undermine speed no longer applies in a world where time has stopped. The pursuing and pursued figures pass through the strange district of snow-white houses and oddly assorted shadows, by a monument resembling an egg, and on toward the gray, shabby tenements. The inhabitants there, like everything else, are motionless.

Significance

The episode reverses the pressure that has governed the Men in Gray’s pursuit. They have treated time as a resource to be secured and consumed, but when it ceases to be available, their apparent power collapses into competition over the cigars that sustain them. Momo, by contrast, has an hour-lily and the freedom to move through the frozen world. The difference gives her the initiative: the Men in Gray are fleeing, and she is able to follow.

That reversal also throws the city’s earlier transformation into sharper relief. Its residents had been saving time while their days seemed to grow shorter; public advertisements promised that time-saving would bring a better life, even as old buildings gave way to standardized housing and life became poorer and more monotonous. The stillness makes the cost of that order literal: clocks, vehicles, food, and people all stop, while the Men in Gray discover that their own existence depends on the time they have taken. Momo’s movement through the silence is therefore more than a supernatural exception. It changes the direction of the action, from escape and helplessness toward pursuit.