The doomsday archives, p.1
The Doomsday Archives, page 1
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
Zando supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, uploading, or distributing this book or any part of it without permission. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for brief quotations embodied in reviews), please contact connect@zandoprojects.com.
Zando Young Readers is an imprint of Zando.
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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.
“No …” Brian muttered. “That’s not possible.”
He dropped his tuba case and raced for the inside doors, yanking them open. A few kids remained in the halls, but as with Ms. Joanna, each figure was frozen in place. Their mouths gaped open midconversation, their feet balanced in dangling strides.
Somehow, the world had stopped for everyone except Brian.
He took a deep breath, just to prove that he could, and pulled at his hair. He was awake. He was alive. This was real. Brian approached a boy and girl several feet away, seventh graders he dimly recognized as members of the drama club. The girl had swept back her long hair with a hand; it hung suspended in the air like decorative Halloween cobwebs.
Brian laughed. He couldn’t help it. This was too bizarre. Too preposterous! Moving back to the door, he peered outside again and was surprised to see his tuba case hanging in midair—frozen in time the moment he dropped it.
“Unreal,” he said, laughing again.
His blood curdled the moment he heard a second voice laughing with him.
Slowly, Brian turned. Across the lobby, a figure stood at the end of a long hallway, one in which the lights had already been cut off for the day. Brian squinted. He couldn’t make out many details. The figure was tall—a teacher, maybe?—and it was every bit as still as everything else. Until it wasn’t.
The figure glided forward in a single, languid movement, rounding and winding as it went, but always pointed in his direction. It tread a circuitous path that felt deceptively hostile to Brian—menace disguised as playfulness. Then, just as suddenly as it’d moved, the figure stopped, still shrouded in darkness.
“Hello?” Brian called, startled by the naked fear in his own voice. “Do you know what’s going on? Why is everyone frozen?”
The stranger said nothing, but Brian could feel its eyes on him. He took a step backward, his hip pressing against the push bar that opened the door.
The figure glided slowly forward again, zigzagging into the light, then paused.
It was an old woman. She was white—pale, but most were in a town as gloomy as New Rotterdam—and wore a knit cardigan and jeans. She looked like any number of sweet New England grandmothers, with a halo of gray-white hair and a disarming, if slightly confused, smile. She must be here to pick some kid up from their after-school activities. Still, she looked a bit bewildered to Brian. Like she didn’t quite know where she was.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need help?”
“Help?” the woman repeated back at him.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Brian said. “But … but are you here for someone?”
“Here for someone …” the old woman echoed again. “I’m here for you, Brian.”
She smiled, and Brian noticed for the first time that the woman had too few teeth. What teeth she did have were long and thin and needlelike. Almost like …
Like fangs.
The woman kept smiling, her grin growing wider and deeper, her teeth longer and sharper. And all this time, she wore the same bewildered expression, even as her jaw unhinged and her mouth gaped open—revealing a ruddy cav ity lined in stubby, jagged points.
Brian’s feet were moving before his mind had caught up.
He slammed the door open, screaming as he tore through the courtyard, past Ms. Joanna and her suspended keys. Glancing behind him, he caught a blur of movement that wound to his right flank, before curving back around again to his left. It was so fast. Impossibly fast!
He pushed forward, ignoring the dizzying sweeps and curls of whatever hunted him. Soon he burst from the courtyard and into the school parking lot, where dozens of parents and teachers awaited.
Some greeted their children with petrified smiles, while others were packed into idling cars. Steam burped upward from exhaust pipes, suspended in time like morning fog clinging stubbornly past its welcome. The lights were bright, the school’s flood beams casting the scene into a strange diorama of families reuniting.
“Help!” Brian shrieked at the assembled adults. “Help me, PLEASE!”
But none of them turned.
None of them even saw poor Brian as he fled for his life.
Nor did they see the writhing shape that pursued him, curving around his left and striking from the side. It took him in full view of a dozen adults, and no one moved a muscle to help.
New Rotterdam was no place to grow up.
Back in the courtyard, the hourglass flowed—its glittering scarlet sand carefully measuring an hour’s worth of time.
When the last grain finally slid through its narrow glass neck, into its gorged belly, there was a subtle sense of movement in the frame. For a moment, it appeared as if the many golden snakes that decorated the hourglass slithered in drowsy circles.
The next moment, the hourglass was gone.
Two sounds immediately echoed across the courtyard. One was a set of keys that jangled to the ground. The other, the bang of a tuba case hitting the pavement.
Brian Skupp, however, was never heard from again.
The Long-Necked Dog
From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project
Despite its name, the New Rotterdam cryptid best known as the Long-Necked Dog has never been confirmed as a dog, wolf, or any other canine. Also called the Cold Beach Skulker and Scuttling Rex, it is a stooped and skeletal figure that walks on four needle-thin legs, according to witnesses. It sways back and forth in the air as it moves—as if perpetually off-balance—yet maneuvers with unsettling speed.
The Long-Necked Dog is always sighted at Cold Beach, foraging along the shore after dusk. Its strange, skittering movements have been described as reminiscent of a dock spider, making it easy to spot against the sand in the waning light, even as precise details are more difficult to pick out. Accounts generally agree that it is mottled and dark, and has a long, stooped neck that hangs low to the ground, the origin of its popularized name.
Due to its evasiveness, the cryptid has become something of an unofficial mascot for the Cold Beach waterfront, with many shops along the shore selling T-shirts and hats bearing its striking silhouette.
The Long-Necked Dog unofficial logo
Only one witness has ever claimed to get a close look at the Long-Necked Dog. In the winter of 1991, beachcomber and self-described detectorist Ashton Guyver was scanning the shore with his metal detector when he reportedly came across the creature feeding on a beached shark.
According to Guyver, as his flashlight caught it, the creature raised its long neck, which he purported wasn’t a neck at all—but another leg. The “dog,” as he claimed, actually had many more than four legs tucked into its body, and many, many more than two eyes. Those eyes, he said, glowed with a milky light beneath the flashlight’s beam.
Here, Guyver’s account becomes confused, a rambling and sometimes contradictory account of the creature speaking to him before retreating to a burrow hidden under the docks, dragging the bloated shark behind it. In an interview with local news station WROT-13, he claimed that the Long-Necked Dog told him of a fabulous treasure buried in secret caverns beneath the beach—of gold and jewelry collected over countless years. Guyver welcomed any fellow treasure hunters to join him in looking for an entrance to the caverns, promising to split the riches.
As far as anyone knows, not a single person took him up on his offer—which is probably for the best. Guyver disappeared the next evening after heading off toward the beach alone. Only his metal detector was ever recovered, its sinewy neck bent into a ruin.
1
“It’s still too early.”
Emrys Houtman sighed from behind his binoculars. He and his friend Hazel were perched on the dunes, peering down at Cold Beach below. They’d been there for an hour already, passing the binoculars back and forth, searching for signs of movement on the sand.
So far, the Long-Necked Dog had yet to appear.
Emrys lowered the lenses and frowned at the horizon, where an enormous thundercloud churned balefully. It was like the sky had grown a great purple eye with which to watch them. Lightning flickered between the clouds, made safe and pretty by its distance. But soon enough all that electricity would make it to shore and come crashing down over New Rotterdam.
The town was rainy more often than it wasn’t, though this coming storm had made the news. It would be a bad one. Emrys had counted at least a dozen waterfront shopkeepers boarding their windows that afternoon.
“We should get back,” Hazel said, as if reading his thoughts. She frowned into the distance, her pale-white face nearly gray under the stormy sky. “The weather’s gonna hit before dusk does. We can try another day.”
“Yeah …” Emrys said dejectedly.
Though Emrys had only recently moved to New Rotterdam, he and Hazel had been friends for years. Sometimes it felt like they shared a brain. They’d met at camp when both were in third grade and formed an immediate bond over their love of scary stories. The moment Emrys was allowed an email account, Hazel had been the very first person he messaged.
He could barely believe it when she’d told him she lived in New Rotterdam, a regular top contender for America’s Most Haunted Cities. If Salem was famous for its witches, and New Orleans for its ghosts, New Rotterdam was a hot spot for urban legends. The Laughing Man, Headless Kate, the Shadow in the Mirror—Emrys and Hazel knew all of the city’s cryptids and creepypastas by heart.
Even before he’d moved there, Emrys had been an active participant in the New Rotterdam Wiki Project, a shared compendium of supernatural sightings. In fact, it was he and Hazel who’d discovered the lost WROT-13 interview of Ashton Guyver buried in the far reaches of the internet, and added it to the entry for the Long-Necked Dog.
The wiki mods had gone bananas when they saw that. They tore Emrys and Hazel’s writing to shreds, of course, but once they’d put it back together again, the two of them were rewarded with special admin status. They could contribute to any entries they liked without restrictions. Emrys had hoped to wow the mods again with an actual sighting today—maybe even a photo—but the cryptid proved elusive.
In fact, he hadn’t seen much of anything since moving to New Rotterdam. Sure, the Faceless Founder statue in Centennial Park was creepy, but even after hours of reconnaissance, it hadn’t budged an inch. And no matter how many times he rode the carousel at the Foghorn Fairgrounds, Headless Kate never appeared atop the rusty unicorn. At least the popcorn had been good.
Emrys had spent the final weeks of summer before school began combing every supposedly supernatural inch of town—the Shallows shopping district, purported nesting ground of the Orchid from Outer Space; the downtown Five Points District, where one could accidentally stumble through a hidden gate to hell!
So far, he’d remained firmly in the real world. Emrys had to remind himself that was probably for the best.
He stowed his binoculars in his backpack. “Ready?” he asked.
Hazel nodded. They stood and trudged toward the parking lot.
A lone hybrid minivan idled among the empty rectangles painted onto the pavement. Despite being the only person in the lot, Emrys’s father had parked perfectly between the lines. He sat now in the front seat, a worn paperback mystery novel propped against the steering wheel.
Though his parents were both avid readers, Emrys had yet to open a book he didn’t immediately want to put down. Try as he might to see a forest through the spindly trees of text—to connect with the story, as Emrys’s teachers had suggested—his whirring mind always seemed to whir away from what he was reading.
