The Wandering Hour

ZACK LORAN CLARK & NICK ELIOPULOS

NEW YORK

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.

Copyright © 2024 by Zachary Loran Clark and Nicholas Eliopulos

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First Edition: January 2024

Text and cover design by Carol Ly

Cover art by Chris Shehan

Interior illustrations by Julian Callos

The publisher does not have control over and is not responsible for author or other third-party websites (or their content).

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933803

978-1-63893-030-3 (Hardcover)

978-1-63893-031-0 (ebook)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Theodore

PROLOGUE

New Rotterdam was no place to grow up.

Though Brian Skupp had lived there his whole life, the seaside town still felt vaguely baffling to him, like a knotty vocabulary word he’d looked up multiple times, but his mind could never hold on to.

For one, its narrow, twisted roads were a maze. He frequently found himself confused when straying from the relatively simple route between home and school. It also didn’t help that the town was often dense with fog: a soupy mass that arrived with dawn and clung stubbornly to the earth until the sun finally elected to rise and shine and scrub the place clean. If it did.

It was an overcast evening, the wind from the Atlantic already bitingly cold. Brian dallied at his locker after band practice, watching as students and teachers rushed home from their after-school activities. He played tuba in band, but not out of any great love for the instrument. Practice just delayed the trip back to his apartment, where he would discover if his father had prepared a meager dinner of boiled hot dogs and instant ramen—or whether it would be up to Brian to feed them both.

Still, he couldn’t linger here forever. Though Brian might delay, time stalked ever onward. The gray sky grew dimmer, the fog colder. He ambled through the school courtyard, toward the front entrance. The halls were thinning, most of the stragglers having made it to the parking lot. He was just about to do the same when he caught a glimmer at the center of the courtyard.

A strange object sat on one of the stone benches, its gold frame completely at odds with the concrete and iron of Gideon de Ruiter Middle School. Stepping closer, Brian saw that the object was a large hourglass, though much fancier than any he’d seen in person. It was about the size of the marble busts displayed in the local history museum—the pale ghosts of the city’s founders captured in stone. Honestly, the hourglass looked like it belonged in a museum, not looming atop some public-school bench.

Gilded snakes writhed along its frame, and the glass was filled with a sparkling red sand that was as fine and serous as blood. Curiously, the sand was only gathered in the top bulb.

That didn’t make sense. Hourglasses flowed down. Was it broken?

Brian edged closer, then lowered his tuba and squatted to get a better look. It seemed intact—the frame was polished and the glass unblemished by any imperfections that he could see. But sure enough, not a single grain occupied the bottom bulb.

Tentatively, he reached out his hand, fingers nearly brushing the hourglass’s tortuous frame.

Brian stopped.

Something about this felt strange, untrustworthy, even—a bizarre object set right where it shouldn’t be. It was almost like one of the scary stories from that wiki, the one that nerdy sixth grader Hazel Grey worked on with her friend, the new kid.

New Rotterdam was practically overflowing with local legends and superstitions, but Brian was an eighth grader now, nearly a high schooler. He didn’t believe in that stuff anymore. And he had real problems to worry over.

Still, on a day like today, with the clouds churning overhead, some inner part of him shrank from the mysterious object. This felt … like a trap.

He lowered his hand.

At the same time, a trickle of red began to thread from the top bulb of the hourglass, sand snaking into the bottom. It curled into a loose spiral that slowly lost its shape.

Then the world stopped.

Brian felt the stillness before he saw it. It was as if some subtle pulse he’d heard all his life—the quiet hum of the universe—had gone silent. He gasped, looking up to find the roiling clouds were now completely motionless. The wind had died as well, far too suddenly. Brian whirled around, searching the school courtyard, where he noticed one of the social studies teachers, Ms. Joanna, standing at the far end.

Something was wrong. Brian didn’t know what, but he knew that right now, he didn’t want to be alone.

Heart pounding, he hefted his tuba case and rushed toward the teacher, not casting another look back at the strange hourglass. If he had, he’d have seen the trickle of sand continue, the lower bulb slowly filling with twinkling red grains.

Ms. Joanna was digging through her purse, probably retrieving her car keys. But as Brian got closer, he noticed she was strangely static. Unnaturally so. Her eyes were on her purse, her left foot raised as if to take a step. But she didn’t take it. Instead, she balanced perfectly in place on one foot, more astonishingly still than even a ballerina could achieve.

“Ms. Joanna?” Brian tried.

She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him. She didn’t even move.

Which was when Brian saw the keys.

Ms. Joanna must have dropped them while fishing them from her purse. They hung suspended in the air just beneath it, the keys fanned out into a sheepish, toothy smile, as if caught in the act of sneaking away.

But they didn’t fall. They didn’t fall.