Shadowghast

by Thomas Taylor

  1. All Hallows’ Eve

  2. Birthday Breakfast

  3. Mr. Mummery

  4. Smoke and Mirrors

  5. Caliastra

  6. Violet

  7. The Mermonkey Blinks

  8. The Subtle Mask

  9. Midnight Visitor

  10. Manglewick Candles

  11. Something in the Window

  12. The Puppet Master

  13. Padlocks and Crowbars

  14. Chips for None

  15. Arcade

  16. Things Out of Thin Air

  17. Prestocadabra!

  18. The Coiled Dragon

  19. Phantasmagoria

  20. The Volunteer

  21. A Bit Bamboozled

  22. Clermit

  23. Secret Chamber

  24. The Collected Works of Sebastian Eels

  25. The Forgotten Hat

  26. Void

  27. The Netherways

  28. Light and Dark

  29. Guiding Star

  30. Ghasts and Gurdies

  31. Undergrounded

  32. Ninny Brain and Yelly Belly

  33. The Battle of the Lost-and-Foundery

  34. Cat Nav

  35. The Promise

  36. Dr. Thalassi

  37. Pickled Lemon

  38. The Magician’s Assistant

  39. Creepy Clowns

  40. Shadowless

  41. Catbrows and Bookmarks

  42. Amazement Guaranteed!

  43. Ghastly Night

  44. Buttons and Cinders

  45. Where There’s Smoke . . .

  46. Ashes and Aftermath

  47. A Surprising Offer

  About the Author

  Do you remember your first Ghastly Night?

  The first time you saw Eerie-on-Sea’s special Halloween show?

  The first time you gathered on the pier with your friends and family and huddled in the cold night air—and the glow of the manglewick candles—as you waited for the magic to begin?

  Perhaps you were carried there on your dad’s shoulders, caramel apple in one hand, sparkler in the other? Or perhaps you peeked from snug inside your mum’s coat as the puppet master lit the lantern.

  Remember how you blinked in the beam of eerie light?

  Remember how the strange fumes tickled your nose?

  Remember how you gasped in wonder as the showman’s hands conjured puppets of shadow—forms and phantasmagoria that crept and capered and danced above you in the smoky autumn air?

  And did you see it?

  Did you catch a glimpse of that extra shadow—one not made by the skillful showman’s fingers?

  A shadow not cast by anything at all?

  A crooked figure, cavorting in dark delight at the edge of the lantern’s beam, never—when you turned to look—quite where you thought it was, but always there, hunting, tormenting, snatching the showman’s shadow puppets one by one till the show was ended.

  And the smoke curled away to nothing.

  And all the shadows were gone.

  And no sound remained but the hiss of the lantern and the creak of the pier and the churn of the endless sea.

  Well? Do you remember?

  Did you ever see the Shadowghast?

  But what am I saying?

  Of course you didn’t!

  You’ve probably never even heard of Ghastly Night, or manglewick candles, or any of it.

  Unless, that is, you’ve been to Eerie-on-Sea before, and asked too many questions. But even then, I’m sure you’d have forgotten this strange tradition of ours, falling as it does on the night the rest of the world knows as Halloween. Like most people at this time of year, you’re probably too busy carving pumpkins or planning your trick-or-treat costume to pay much attention to the funny old ways of a little seaside town. Too busy make-believing in goblins and ghosts to worry about the one legend of a bad spirit that might actually be true.

  And that’s fine.

  For you.

  But if you lived in Eerie, you’d see it differently. If you stayed behind when the summer tourists left, and the candy-colored signs of seaside fun faded into the dark of winter, you’d know. You, too, would hurry a little faster through the blustery streets as the days grew shorter and the shadows long. And when the end of October finally arrived, you’d put up a manglewick candle for protection, too.

  Just in case.

  Just in case this is the year that Ghastly Night is forgotten and no showman lights a lantern on the pier to conjure shadow puppets in offering to the dark. For if that should ever happen, so folks say, the Shadowghast—enraged by the insult—would hunt instead for the shadows of the living.

  But I see you’re smiling.

  You’re still thinking the Shadowghast is nothing more than a silly superstition.

  No more than a trick of the light.

  Only, remember this: at the heart of every legend is a spark of truth. And when the sunlight dies and you’re running from the shadows through the deepening streets of Eerie-on-Sea, a spark—no matter how small—is sometimes all you need.

  Unless that trick of the light is actually a trick of the dark.

  Some words just seem to belong together, don’t they? Like magic and lantern, or strange and shadow, or fireside and story. But right now, in the light of morning and the warmth of the hotel dining room, no words seem to go together quite so well as hot and buttered and toast.

  And I should know. When it comes to breakfast, I, Herbert Lemon—Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel—am something of an expert. Which is why I’m concealed behind this giant potted fern, pressing my nose against the glass panels in the dining room wall as the kitchen staff load trays of delicious things onto the sideboard, experting as hard as I can.

  Today is a special day, and a breakfast to end all breakfasts is spreading out before my eyes, dancing up my nostrils, and making my gums go tingly.

  Don’t believe me? Well, come and press your nose to the window next to mine and take a look for yourself at the heaps of sizzled sausages, at the stacks of bacon strips, at the mounds of crispy, hot hash browns. At the eggs, fried white with yolks ready to run, or scrambled to light and peppery perfection; at the honey-glazed button mushrooms, seared tomatoes, and piping-hot baked beans; at the toast, fried or hot and buttered (yes!); at the baskets of just-baked, golden-flaked continental pastries; at the waffles and maple syrup; at the breakfast doughnuts, sparkling with sugar and filled with Chef’s special raspberry jam.

  And in the center of it all, towering above the silverware, fine bone china, and antique knives and forks, stands an enormous cut-glass bowl filled to the creamy brim with a festive and magnificent sherry trifle, topped with a single glacé cherry.

  No wonder my window is getting fogged up! I bet yours is, too.

  Because, you see, today is Lady Kraken’s birthday. And Lady Kraken, the owner of the Grand Nautilus Hotel, has long since decreed that on her birthday a special breakfast will be served, and all—all—the hotel staff are invited.

  The lady herself won’t be present, of course. She never is these days, not now that she’s become such a recluse. But once her own breakfast—a single hard-boiled egg and a thimble of ground cumin—has been carried up to the sixth floor beneath a gleaming silver dome and served in her private chambers with a small cup of black coffee, the rest of us can dig in.

  At least, that’s the theory. But there’s a complication . . .

  “Hurry along!” come the peevish tones of Mr. Mollusc as he claps his hands in clammy command. “Let’s get this over with. The sooner you all get back to work the better.”

  And I duck down below the glass panel as he strides across the dining room, twitching his mustache in anticipation at the bacon and pastr
ies. You see, while it’s Lady Kraken who is giving us all breakfast this morning, it’s Mr. Mollusc, the hotel manager, who decides who eats it first.

  And last.

  “Are you worried you won’t get any?” asks a female voice behind me, and I jump. A hotel guest must have found me hiding in the fern! I should turn around to see if she needs something, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the dining room, where the breakfast situation is developing in alarming ways.

  Mr. Mollusc has seated himself at the best table and is waving the waiters over to pile sausages and eggs on his plate. On the far side of the restaurant, the chambermaids, who will be next, are already beginning to gather in a hungry line.

  “Well, I didn’t get any last year!” I explain to the person behind me. “Or the year before that. Me not getting any of Lady Kraken’s birthday breakfast has almost become part of the tradition.”

  “Oh,” says the voice. “That’s sad.”

  “Well, I might get a croissant,” I admit as I see a waiter lay three of the buttery pastries at the manager’s elbow. “If there are any left. But only once it’s been lying around a day or two to get all stale and chewy.”

  “This year will be different, Herbie,” says the voice. And it’s a lovely voice, too, like dark honey, and it makes the nape of my neck go all ticklish. “I promise.”

  I feel a hand straighten my cap gently, then pat me on the shoulder.

  And I go still.

  The breakfast smells have stepped aside, making way for a wisp of perfume, though it’s gone before I can get a good sniff. I’m left wanting to smell that perfume again. I finally turn around to see who was speaking, but there’s nothing there now except the fronds of the fern I thought I was hiding behind. I get a bit tangled in the pesky plant before I can step back out into the lobby to see who it was.

  There are people at the reception desk, checking into the hotel. A stout red-faced man with a homburg hat is being handed several room keys by Amber Griss, the hotel receptionist, while two tall men dressed head-to-toe in black stand behind him, laden with boxes and cases. None of these seems like the lovely-voice-and-perfume type, but beyond them is a fourth figure.

  A woman is standing beside the brass elevator, her back to me. She is tall and willowy, with raven hair, and wears a black embroidered coat that catches the light in odd ways. I find myself wishing the woman would turn around, but she doesn’t.

  Then something strange happens.

  The clouds over Eerie-on-Sea part, and a ray of golden sunlight streams through one of the tall hotel windows, and over the group.

  And I see . . .

  something!

  Something wrong with the scene, with the way the light falls, or the way the shadows are cast, or . . .

  I rub my eyes and blink as I try to get a fix on the strange effect, but just then the elevator arrives and the woman with the raven hair steps into it. The men with the luggage crowd in behind her. The elevator door closes, and they are gone.

  I rub my eyes again. Maybe I’m going a bit bonkers due to lack of breakfast.

  But I can’t help wondering about the woman with the raven hair.

  Who is she? What did she mean?

  And, I ask out loud, “How does she know my name?”

  First of the oddballs already arrived, then?” I say to Amber Griss at the reception desk.

  Amber gives me a warning tut.

  “Don’t let Mr. Mollusc hear you talk about our guests that way, Herbie.”

  She doesn’t add “even though it’s true,” but she doesn’t need to. We both know that Lady Kraken’s birthday, falling as it does near the end of October, marks the beginning of the winter season. We won’t see a shovel-and-pail tourist for months now. But what we will see, as the town closes up and the weather closes in, is . . . well, we’ll just have to wait to find out, won’t we? But one thing’s for sure: in Eerie-on-Sea, in the winter, we’re bound to see something. Whether we want to or not.

  “Who are they?” I ask, trying to catch a name in the register that Amber is writing in. “Those new guests? They had some weird-looking luggage.”

  “They’re a theater troupe of some kind.” Amber closes the book quickly and clicks her pen.

  “But have they stayed here before?” I’m still wondering how the woman with the raven hair knew my name.

  “I don’t recognize them,” Amber replies. “All I know is that they’ve been invited to town to put on this year’s Ghastly Night show.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “It’s Lady Kraken’s idea,” Amber explains. “She thinks it’s time we celebrated the thing properly again, in the theater on the pier, like in the old days . . .”

  Then Amber trails off, her spectacles flashing in warning as she spots something over my shoulder.

  I do a gulp.

  I know what’s coming.

  My mind races as I try to think of a way to make myself look busy, but since I’m leaning on the reception desk with my hands in my pockets and my Lost-and-Founder’s cap at a jaunty angle, I don’t have much to work with.

  “Herbert Lemon!” comes the jabby voice of Mr. Mollusc behind me. “What precisely are you doing? Or rather not doing. Just because you don’t have any proper work to do doesn’t mean you should keep Miss Griss from doing hers.”

  I turn around and slowly straighten my cap. The hotel manager is standing over me, his mustache bristling with annoyance. There’s a blob of egg yolk on his tie.

  “I was sort of doing work, sir,” I reply. “I was just offering to cover Reception while Amber . . . Miss Griss, I mean . . . goes in for the yummy birthday breakfast. I wouldn’t want her to miss out, sir. Imagine not getting any breakfast at all, sir! That would be sad, wouldn’t it, sir?”

  And I give him my most hardworking and deserving face, full beam.

  “Yes, well . . .” says Mr. Mollusc, ignoring the face completely. “You should indeed go in for the breakfast now, Miss Griss. There is still a little left, though there won’t be for long—the laundry workers are in next, and then the kitchen staff will polish off the rest, I expect. I suggest you make haste, Miss Griss. The bacon is already finished.”

  “!” I blurt out, because I can’t help myself. Bacon and finished are two words that never go well together. “Sir . . . !”

  Mollusc ignores me as he waves Amber away.

  “I will watch the reception desk myself,” he declares as if doing everyone an enormous favor. Then he sinks into Amber’s chair and finally looks me in the eye. “I suggest you go watch yours, boy.”

  “But . . . !”

  “No buts!” Mr. Mollusc shuts me down. “And no sneaking out the cellar window, either. Oh, yes, Mr. Lemon, I know all about that. I’m tempted to move the hotel garbage cans in front of that window to stop you and that annoying friend of yours from climbing in and out. This is a respectable hotel, not a school for burglars. Now, go!”

  And just like that, I’m dismissed. I trudge back to my cubbyhole, my feet heavy, my tummy a birthday-breakfast–free zone once again.

  So much for this year being different!

  If you’ve been to the Grand Nautilus Hotel before, you’ll know all about my cubbyhole. It’s in the hotel lobby, across the polished marble floor from Reception. It’s a little arched opening in the wall, with a flip-up desk so that I can get in and out. The cubbyhole is the only part of the Lost-and-Foundery the guests ever see, so it probably doesn’t look like much. But if you’ve stayed here, and if you lost something while you did, you probably found yourself at my desk at least once, ringing the bell, waiting for yours truly to come to help. And I bet, if you did report something missing, there’s a good chance I found it for you, too. Because—whatever you may have heard old Mollusc say—I’m actually quite good at my job.

  I flip up the desk and flop down in my chair.

  There is a folded piece of paper waiting for me, with a big H L for Herbert Lemon scrawled on it. A message? I open it up and read what’s th
ere:

  Herbie, come quick! It’s an emergency!! Lost-and-Foundering urgently required!!! Bring Clermit!!!!

  Violet x

  I sigh. Not this again!

  Violet—my very best friend in Eerie-on-Sea—did not have a good summer. She arrived last year in the depths of winter and promptly propelled me into two—two!—epic adventures that would make your niblets go knobbly if you heard about them. Adventures that left her expecting life in Eerie-on-Sea to be nonstop mystery and excitement forever. But the long ice-cream months of May to September—with their tourists and deck chairs and sandy swimming trunks—were a disappointment to Violet. She’s been itching to find another Eerie adventure for weeks now, and every note she sends claiming to have spotted one has more exclamation marks on it than the last.

  But I’m not in the mood for this right now. I glance again at the door of the elevator and get a memory rush of the mysterious raven-haired woman’s intoxicating perfume. I’ll go to see Violet later.

  My eye falls on a white pearlescent shell on a shelf nearby.

  “Hello, Clermit,” I say to the shell as I lift it down and blow a few loose grains of sand from out of the brass-rimmed keyhole in its side.

  It may seem funny that a shell should have a name (and a keyhole!), but this shell is special. Not only does it have some nifty clockwork inside, but, you see, I once made this shell a promise.

  Clermit—which is short for “clockwork hermit crab”—is one of the lost things in my Lost-and-Foundery. I need to take care of him until I can find his rightful owner. I’ve been carefully cleaning him over the summer, but I can’t quite bring myself to wind his winder-upper just yet. Last time I did, it led to one of those epic adventures I mentioned.

  Violet has been begging me to wind Clermit again for months.

  I pick up a fine screwdriver and carefully coax out a few more grains of sand from inside the clockwork hermit crab’s fabulously complicated mechanism. I can’t help wondering what the woman with the raven hair would say if she came along and saw me fixing such a beautiful and complicated little gadget . . .

  I put Clermit down and sigh.

  I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on anything today.