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Chapter 1
Midwinter
Time.
It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it?
One moment you’re excited about everything to come, the next it feels like those new beginnings were nothing but the first steps toward the end.
“Herbie.”
It’s the ticking that gets me—the endless ticking of a clock as it counts away all the things you haven’t done yet . . .
“Herbie?”
. . . and reminds you that you are always late, even for the things you do do.
“Herbie! Wake up!”
The voice of my friend Violet Parma slaps me back to the here and now. It’s evening, and we’re in my lost-property cellar in the cozy glow of the wood-burning stove, surrounded by a century’s worth of forgotten items, mislaid whatsits, and assorted doodaddery of every description. Icy snow scratches at the basement window as the dismal weather of late December gusts around the town of Eerie-on-Sea. Violet is in my armchair up to her chin in blankets and the purrs of Erwin the cat, while I, Herbert Lemon—Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel—am wobbling on the bottom step, staring at something in my hand.
Because it’s only gone and happened again, hasn’t it?
“Sorry!” I gasp. “Did you . . . did you feel that?”
“Feel what?” Violet regards me curiously. “Your bell rang, you went up and answered it, and now you’re back down here, clutching the wall and looking green. What’s there to feel?”
I shake my head clear. It’s obvious that Violet sensed no eerie vibrations, no dizzy-in-the-head-fizzy-in-the-fingers sensation like the ones I’ve been getting lately—a weird wooziness that makes my brain go all funny and my thoughts go all runny. But then, getting queasy about things is a bit of a specialty of mine, especially when we’re overdue for a new adventure.
“It’s nothing.” I straighten my cap. “Forget it.”
“It’s not nothing,” says Violet as I join her by the armchair.
“Something’s just been handed into your Lost-and-Foundery, Herbie, and made you go all weird. And I’d like to know what.”
Then, before I can stop her, she darts up and snatches the object from my hand.
And what is this thing that set the bell on my desk ringing and my thoughts ticktocking on the theme of vanished time? Well, see for yourself.
It’s a watch.
A battered, broken wristwatch that was obviously lost many years ago.
“Ooh,” says Violet, turning it over in her hand. “A windup one, too.” And she roughly twists the little winder knob between her forefinger and thumb, before burying the watch in her wild hair, about where her ear must be.
“Nope,” she declares, disappointed. “Not a tick.”
She holds the watch up to show me its shattered face.
“Dead!” she declares dramatically. “Frozen forever at the moment of some terrible crime . . .”
“Give me that!” I grab the watch back. “I haven’t had a chance to check it yet, that’s all. It was found by a cleaner down the back of a radiator in the hotel restaurant. Probably been there for years. Just needs a bit of looking after, that’s all.”
“A terrible crime,” Violet continues as if I haven’t spoken, “that happened at midnight!”
“Midnight?”
I look back at the cracked face of the watch. Its two hands point straight up at the number twelve, as if its very last act was to try to surrender.
“Could be midday,” I suggest. “Why do you always go for the most alarming option?”
Violet grins and scratches Erwin behind the ear.
“Either way, Herbie, no one will want that watch now. It looks like someone trod on it. Best to just chuck it out.”
“Chuck it out!” I splutter, hardly able to believe my ears. “You mean throw it away?”
“Of course,” Vi replies. “It’s useless. Don’t tell me you’re going to keep it.”
I hold up the watch and turn it in the light. As well as the cracked glass and the dust of decades, the leather strap is baked stiff by radiator heat, and the steel casing is crisscrossed with scratches. I admit, the prospects of fixing this watch are not great. But then I glance over to the small shelf below where I hang my Lost-and-Founder’s cap. There, gleaming in the warm firelight and packed full of mechanical wonders, is the pearlescent shell of my trusty clockwork hermit crab, Clermit.
“I can’t believe, Vi,” I reply, “that even after you have been here a whole year, you still don’t get how my Lost-and-Foundery works. It’s my job to look after this watch, no matter how battered and busted. And get it back to its rightful owner, too, if I can.”
With this, I take the winder in my own forefinger and thumb, and give it a steady twist, like a pro. Then I hold it to my own ear.
But if I had hoped to somehow prove a point to Violet, I’m disappointed.
The watch remains silent and still.
And dead.
“Just toss it, Herbie,” Violet insists. “And I haven’t been here quite a year, have I? Not yet. I arrived on Midwinter’s night, remember? That’s still two days away.”
Remember?
How could I forget?
And what a not-quite-a-year it has been!
A rush of memories from our adventures barges uninvited through my mind: our near-death experience with the legendary malamander, monstrous mayhem with the storm fish Gargantis, the terror of our dealings with a being known as the Shadowghast, and then—just a few weeks ago—all those gruesome goings-on at Festergrimm’s Eerie Waxworks.
My life has hardly been boring since Violet showed up in it.
But I don’t say all this, of course. I may be a newer, braver Herbie these days, but I still don’t want to encourage talk of adventures, not with the longest night of the year so very close and Christmas just around the corner. Instead, I take up the slimmest screwdriver I can nd on my repair desk and pop the back off the broken watch.
Inside, in contrast with the ruined exterior, the watch’s clockwork mechanism gleams pristinely. Holding it to the lamplight, I stare into the brass wheels and cogs, wondering where to even begin.
“But,” comes Violet’s voice again, “exciting though my time here has been, what was the point of it all?”
I look up to find that it’s Violet’s turn to stare into space now, her excited mood suddenly gone, her eyes bright inside her hair.
“Prp?” says Erwin.
“A year!” Violet cries. “A year since I came here to find my parents, Herbie, and found instead . . . you! And Eerie-on-Sea, and a whole new life of adventure and magic. And yet, wonderful though it has been, I’m no nearer to solving the mystery of my parents’ disappearance than I was that first night. So, maybe, in the end, this amazing year has all been for nothing, after all.”
“It’s not nothing!” I say, just as Violet did a moment ago. “I mean, you came to find your parents, Vi, and—and found yourself instead. Like a character in a book or something.”
“That’s a bit corny, Herbie.”
“Yeah, well”—I turn back to the watch—“it’s still true.”
And then I see it: a tiny, sparkling grain of sand lodged between two cogs. I take my screwdriver, and—as delicately as I can—I push the grain of sand out of the watch mechanism.
Instantly, I’m rewarded with the sound of a tick, and the sight of tiny brass cogs moving again after however long it has been.
“There.” I close the watch and hand it to Vi. “Now, if you’ll set the correct time, please, I’ll write out a lost-and-found label and— Hey!”
I shout this last bit because Violet suddenly jumps out of her chair, scattering Erwin all over the room.
“Herbie!” she cries. “The time! Have you forgotten what we’re doing tonight? We’re going to be late!”
In a moment she has set the watch, buckled it onto her wrist, and is pulling on her coat.
I do a shudder.
I can’t help it!
I haven’t forgotten what we’re doing tonight, but I was hoping Violet had.
“Don’t look like that.” Violet grins as she winds her scarf around her neck. “We promised. And judging by the weather outside, it’s the perfect night for it.”
“That’s what worries me!”
I reach for my own coat, trying not to look at the darkness beyond the window. We’re just two days out from the night when legend says that a terrifying creature called the malamander emerges from its lair to hunt on the beach of Eerie-on-Sea. It’s madness to go near the sea on a night like this, and Vi and I—after everything that happened last Midwinter—have more reason to stay away than most. And yet, here we are getting ready to do just that.
“Come on, Herbie,” says Vi, opening the cellar window and letting a billow of hard, snowy air tumble into my cozy home. “We mustn’t be late.” Then she adds with a wink, “We have a monster to catch.”
