Who Could That Be at This Hour?

by Lemony Snicket

  “We got in through a pair of double doors,” I said, but Theodora just shook her head at me and kept driving. We passed the small white cottage and then came to a stop in front of the lighthouse, which needed painting and seemed to lean ever so slightly to one side.

  “Listen, Snicket,” she said, taking off her helmet again. “We can’t just knock on the door of a house of thieves and tell them we’re looking for stolen goods. We’re going to have to use a con, a word which here means a bit of trickery. And don’t tell me you already know what that means. In fact, don’t say anything at all. You hear me, Snicket?”

  I heard her, so I didn’t say anything at all. She marched up to the door of the lighthouse and rang the doorbell six times.

  “Why do you always—”

  “I said don’t say anything,” Theodora hissed as the door swung open. A man stood there wearing a bathrobe and a pair of slippers and a large, yawning mouth. He looked like he was planning on staying in that bathrobe for quite some time.

  “Yes?” he said when the yawn was done with him.

  “Mr. Mallahan?” Theodora asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “You don’t know me,” she said in a bright, false voice. “I’m a young woman and this is my husband and we’re on our honeymoon and we’re both crazy about lighthouses. Can we come in and talk to you for a minute?”

  Mallahan scratched his head. I started to hide my hands behind my back, because I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but it occurred to me that there were lots of reasons not to believe that a boy of almost thirteen was married to a woman of Theodora’s age, so I left my hands where they were. “I guess so,” the man said, and ushered us into a small room with a large, winding staircase leading up. The staircase undoubtedly led to the top of the lighthouse, but to get there, you would have had to step over the girl sitting on the stairs with a typewriter. She looked about my age, although the typewriter looked a lot older. She pecked a few sentences into it and then paused to look up at me and smile. Her smile was nice to look at, along with the hat she was wearing, which was brown with a rounded top like a lowercase a. She looked up from her typing, and I saw that her eyes were full of questions. “I was just trying to find the coffee,” Mallahan said, gesturing to an open door through which I could see a small kitchen stacked with dishes. “Do you want some?”

  “No,” Theodora said, “but I’ll come along and talk to you while we let the children play.”

  Mallahan gave a shrug and walked off to the kitchen while Theodora made little shooing motions at me. It is always terrible to be told to go play with people one doesn’t know, but I climbed the stairs until I was standing in front of the typing girl.

  “I’m Lemony Snicket,” I said.

  She stopped typing and reached into the band of her hat for a small card, which she gave me to read.

  MOXIE MALLAHAN. THE NEWS.

  “The News,” I repeated. “What’s the news, Moxie?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she replied, and typed a few more words. “Who’s that woman who knocked on the door? How could she be married to you? Where did you come from? What makes you crazy about lighthouses? Why did she shoo you away? And is Snicket spelled like it sounds?”

  “Yes,” I said, answering the last question first. “Are you a reporter?”

  “I’m the only reporter left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea,” Moxie replied. “It’s in my blood. My parents were both reporters when this place wasn’t just a lighthouse but a newspaper, too. The Stain’d Lighthouse. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  “I can’t say I have,” I said, “but I’m not from around here.”

  “Well, the newspaper’s out of business,” Moxie said, “but I still try to find out everything that’s happening in this town. So?”

  “So?”

  “So what’s happening, Snicket? Tell me what’s going on.”

  She put her fingers down on the keys, ready to type whatever I was going to say. Her fingers looked ready to work.

  “Do you generally know everything that’s happening in this town?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Really, Moxie?”

  “Really, Snicket. Tell me what’s going on and maybe I can help you.”

  I stopped looking at her typewriter and looked at her eyes. Their color was pretty interesting, too—a dark gray, like they’d once been black but somebody had washed them or perhaps had made her cry for a long time. “Can I tell you without you writing it down?” I asked.

  “Off the record, you mean?”

  “Off the record, yes.”

  She reached under the typewriter and clicked something, and the whole apparatus folded into a square with a handle, like a black metal suitcase. It was a neat trick. “What is it?”

  I looked back down the stairs to make sure nobody else was listening. “I’m trying to solve a mystery,” I said, “concerning the Bombinating Beast.”

  “The mythical creature?”

  “No, a statue of it.”

  “That old gimcrack?” she said with a laugh. “Come on up.”

  She stood and ran quickly up the spiral staircase, her shoes making the sort of racket that might give your mother a headache, if you have that sort of mother. I followed her up a few curves to a large room with high ceilings and piles of junk that were almost as high. There were a few large, dusty machines with cobwebbed cranks and buttons that hadn’t been pressed for years. There were tables with chairs stacked on them, and piles of paper shoved underneath desks. You could tell it had been a busy room once, but now Moxie and I were the only people in it, and all that busyness was just a ghost.

  “This is the newsroom,” she said. “The Stain’d Lighthouse was here on the waterfront, typing up stories day and night, and this was the center of the whole operation. We’d develop photographs in the basement, and reporters would type up stories in the lantern room. We’d print the paper with ink made just that day, and we’d let the papers dry on the long hawser that runs right out the window.”

  “Hawser?” I said, and she clomped to the window and opened it. Outside, hanging high over the trees, was a long, thick cable that ran straight down the hill toward the gleaming windows of the mansion I’d just visited.

  “It looks like that goes right down to the Sallis place,” I said.

  “The Mallahans and the Sallises have been friends for generations,” Moxie said. “We got our water from the well on their property, and our science and garden reporters did research on their grounds. Our copy editor rented their guest cottage, and we would turn on the lighthouse lantern for midnight badminton parties. Of course, all that’s gone now.”

  “Why?”

  “Not enough ink,” Moxie said. “The industry is down to its last few schools of octopi. This whole town is fading, Snicket. There’s a library, and a police station, and a few other places open for business, but more than half of the buildings in town are completely unpeopled. The Stain’d Lighthouse had to shut down publication. Most inkworkers have been fired. The train passes through about once a month. Soon Stain’d-by-the-Sea will be gone completely. My mother got a letter from the city and left for a job with another newspaper.”

  “When are you joining her?” I asked.

  Moxie looked quietly out the window for a moment, giving me an idea about who had made her cry. “As soon as I can,” she said with a sigh, and I realized it had been the wrong thing to say.

  “The Bombinating Beast,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, right,” she said, and walked over to a table covered in a sheet. “The Bombinating Beast was sort of the mascot of the newspaper. Its body made the S in Stain’d. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago Lady Mallahan slew the Bombinating Beast on one of her voyages. So my family has quite the collection of Bombinating merchandise, although no one’s ever cared about it except—”

  “Snicket!” Theodora’s voice came from the bottom of the staircase. “Time to go!”

 
“Just one minute!” I called back.

  “Right this minute, Snicket!” Theodora answered, but I didn’t leave right that minute. I stayed as Moxie drew back the sheet to reveal another table piled with items nobody wanted. The sea horse face of the Bombinating Beast wasn’t any less hideous no matter how many times I saw it. There were three stuffed Bombinating Beasts that you might give to a baby you wanted to frighten, and a deck of cards with Bombinating Beasts printed on the back. There were Bombinating Beast coffee mugs and Bombinating Beast cereal bowls stacked up with Bombinating Beast napkins on Bombinating Beast place mats. But beside this beastly meal, next to the Bombinating Beast ashtray and the Bombinating Beast candleholders, was an object very shiny and black in color. Moxie had called it a gimcrack, and Mrs. Murphy Sallis had called it a priceless item. It was about the size of a bottle of milk and said to be valued at upward of a great deal of money. It was the Bombinating Beast, the statue we were looking for, as dusty and forgotten as the rest of the items in the room.

  “Snicket!” Theodora called again, but I didn’t answer her. I spoke to the statue instead. “Hello,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  Moxie looked at me and smiled. “I guess your mystery is solved, Snicket,” she said, but that, too, was the wrong thing to say.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “While you were mucking about with that flatfooted girl,” Theodora said to me as she started her roadster and put on her helmet, “I managed to solve the mystery. I have reason to believe that the Bombinating Beast is in that very lighthouse.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “Then we’re in agreement,” Theodora said. “I had quite a talk with that Mr. Mallahan. He told me he used to work in the newspaper business but lately has had quite the run of bad luck! Aha!”

  My chaperone looked at me like I should aha! back, but all I could manage was a quiet “ah.” I made a note to ha later. We drove past the mansion toward the center of town. Moxie was right. It was an unpeopled place. Stain’d-by-the-Sea looked like it had been a regular town once, with shops full of items, and restaurants full of food, and citizens looking for one or the other. But now the whole place had faded to gray. Many of the buildings had windows that were broken or boarded up, and the sidewalks were uncared for, with great cracks in the concrete, and empty bottles and cans rolling around in the bored wind. Whole blocks were completely empty, with no cars except our own and not a single pedestrian on the streets. Some ways away was a building shaped like a pen that towered over the rest of the town, as if Stain’d-by-the-Sea were about to be crossed out. I didn’t like it. It looked like anyone could move in and do anything they wanted without anyone stopping them. The Clusterous Forest almost looked friendlier.

  “No job, no wife, a man like that can get desperate,” Theodora was saying. “Desperate enough to steal a very valuable statue from one of his enemies. When I asked him if there was anything in his house that was worth upward of a great deal of money, he looked at me strangely and said something about his only daughter. I think he has it hidden away somewhere.”

  “It’s upstairs,” I said, “on a table covered in a sheet.”

  “What?” Theodora stopped at a red light. I had seen no other cars on the road. Only the stoplights were around, telling nobody but us when to stop and when to go. “How did you find it?”

  “His daughter showed me,” I said. “She’s not flatfooted, by the way. She just wears heavy shoes.”

  “Be sensible,” Theodora said. “How did you get her to show it to you?”

  “I asked her,” I said.

  “She must be onto us,” Theodora said, with a frown. “We’d better act quickly if we want to steal it back.”

  “How do we even know it was stolen?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a numbskull, Snicket. Mrs. Sallis told us it was stolen right off her mantel.”

  “Moxie said the statue belonged to her family. The beast was the mascot of The Stain’d Lighthouse.”

  “That lighthouse wasn’t stained. It just needed painting.”

  “We need to investigate further,” I said.

  “No, we don’t,” Theodora said firmly. “We’re not going to call a distinguished woman a liar and believe the word of a little girl. Particularly one with a ridiculous name.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “What does the S stand for?”

  “Silly boy,” she said with a shake of her head, and pulled the car to a stop. We were parked in front of a building with a sagging roof and a porch crowded with dying plants in cracked flowerpots. A painted wooden sign, which must have been magnificent to look at centuries ago when it was painted, read THE LOST ARMS. “This is our headquarters,” Theodora said, taking off her helmet and shaking her hair. “This is our lodgings and our nerve center and our home office and our command post. This is where we’ll be staying. Carry the suitcases, Snicket.”

  She bounded up the stairs, and I got out of the roadster and looked around the dreary street. Down the block I could see one other open business, a lonely-looking restaurant called Hungry’s, and in the other direction the street came to a dead end at a tall building with gray carved pillars on either side of the doors. There was no one about, and the only other car I could see was a dented yellow taxi parked in front of the restaurant. I was hungry again, or maybe I was still hungry. Something in me felt empty, certainly, but the more I stood there the less sure I was that it was my stomach, so I leaned into the backseat and pulled out two suitcases—the one that Theodora had said was mine and another, larger one that must have been hers. It was burdensome to carry them up the stairs, and when I entered the Lost Arms, I put them down for a minute to catch my breath in the lobby.

  The room had a complicated smell, as if many people were in it, but there were very few things in the place. There was a small sofa with a table next to it that was even smaller, and it was hard to say from this angle which was grimier. It was probably a tie. On the table was a small wooden bowl of peanuts that were either salted or dusty. There was a small booth in the corner, where a tall man with no hat was talking on the phone, which I looked at wistfully for a moment, hoping he would hang up and give me a chance to use it. There was a desk in a far corner, where Theodora was talking to a thin man who was rubbing his hands together, and right in the center of the room was a tall statue made of plaster, of a woman who wore no clothes and had no arms.

  “I guess you have it worse than I do,” I said to her.

  “Stop dawdling, Snicket,” Theodora called to me, and I trudged our suitcases to the desk. The thin man was handing two keys to Theodora, who handed me one of them.

  “Welcome to the Lost Arms,” the man said in a voice as thin as he was. His manner reminded me of a word I’d been taught and then had forgotten. It was on the tip of my tongue, as was one last cookie crumb. “I’m the owner and operator of this establishment, Prosper Lost. You can call me Prosper, and you can call me anytime you have a problem. The phone is right over there.”

  “Thank you,” I said, thinking I’d probably just walk over to the desk rather than wait for the phone.

  “As you requested,” Prosper continued, “I’ve arranged for you two to have the least expensive room, the Far East Suite, located on the second floor. I’m afraid the elevator isn’t working today, so you’ll have to take the stairs. May I ask how long you plan on staying?”

  “For the duration,” my chaperone said, and walked quickly toward a carpeted staircase with banisters that looked too fragile to touch. I did not need Theodora or anyone else to explain that “for the duration” was a phrase which here meant nothing at all. Instead, I followed Theodora up the stairs, dragging the suitcases behind me, and down a narrow hallway to a room marked FAR EAST SUITE. Theodora got the key into a fight with the keyhole, but after a few minutes the door was open, and we stepped into our new home.

  You’ve probably never been to the Far East Suite at the Lost Arms in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but I’m sure you’ve been in a room you cou
ldn’t wait to leave, which is about the same thing. Most of the room was a large bed and a small bed, separated by a squat chest of drawers that appeared to be frowning. There was a door to a bathroom, and a small table in a corner with a metal plate that plugged into the wall, probably for heating up food. Overhead was a light fixture shaped like a complicated star, and the only thing on the walls was a painting, hung over the smaller bed, of a little girl holding a dog with a bandaged paw. The room was quite dark, but even when I unshuttered the lone window, the Far East Suite was no brighter than it had been.

  “We’re sharing a room?” I asked.

  “Be sensible, Snicket,” Theodora replied. “We can change our clothes in the bathroom. Now why don’t you slide your suitcase under your bed and go out to the lobby to play or something? I’m going to unpack and take a nap. That always helps me think, and I need to think of how we can get our hands on that statue.”

  “There’s a hawser,” I said, “that runs from the lighthouse down to the Sallis mansion.”

  “Hawser?”

  “A hawser is a cable,” I said.

  “I knew that.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t help asking. “I had to learn it from a little girl.”

  Theodora sat on the large bed with a long sigh and ran her hands through her endless hair. “Let me rest, Snicket,” she said. “Be back for dinner. I think we’ll dine later this evening.”

  “Later than what?”

  “Later than usual.”

  “We’ve never dined together.”

  “You’re not helping me rest, Snicket.”

  I was restless, too, and slid my suitcase under the bed and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me. A minute later I was back on the sidewalk, looking at the empty street with my hands full of peanuts I’d grabbed from the lobby. I had more privacy outside the Lost Arms than I did in the Far East Suite. I liked privacy, but I still didn’t know how to fill the time I had before dinner, so I turned and walked down the block to the building with the pillars, which looked like my best bet for something interesting.