Chapter Text
Some things hadn't changed at all, and something about that made Moxie happy.
Sure, her career revolved around the new and exciting. And sure, she'd take a good story any day over stagnation. Just this morning, the debut of a brand-new train, with all the modern amenities, on the Stain’d-by-the-Sea line had caused so much of a buzz among the townspeople that business had been booming.
News was useful. But, she had to admit, consistency could be a comfort.
Consistency was what she got late at night at the top of the lighthouse, the salt-infused air ruffling the curly hair that she'd tied back earlier that day. She could look down at a town asleep but thriving and see the same establishments she'd always known, the same streets, the same weathered sign in the distance welcoming visitors to their little seaside community.
She could fill her lungs with the night air, now, without smelling the barest hint of death and decay. Instead, salt and marine life and fresh ink, a unique blend of fragrances that brought her immediately back to early childhood, filled the air around her.
Reintroducing the water to a parched sea tended to do that.
The day had been busy, the writers at The Stain’d Lighthouse working diligently to get the next issue off the presses and into the hands of the townsfolk. She'd dealt with a nasty paper jam earlier that day that had rendered about fifty of their copies virtually illegible, and she needed time now to settle her frazzled nerves before heading to bed. Standing just outside the lantern room and leaning on the railing always seemed to do the trick after a rough day. Sometimes she would look out over the town and the sea, secretly pretending that she was its silent, staunch protector; other times, she would just close her eyes and breathe.
Tonight was one of those nights that required breathing.
It was a ritual, at this point. Meditation. Here, seven stories above everything, problems seemed a bit farther away from her. The only issue was that memories, so much lighter than problems, were able to reach her up here. Sometimes her mind raced with questions about her parents, about whether they were enjoying life in the city, about whether they had forgotten their daughter who had stayed behind to take care of things. Other times, she thought about her friends, probably fast asleep in their beds below.
And still other times, on quiet nights or in times of great joy or sorrow, she caught herself thinking about a twelve-year-old boy dressed far too sharply for his age. She shoved those thoughts out of her mind as quickly as they came. Those thoughts were dangerous. They had twisted her stomach into an anxious knot when Cleo had announced Ink Inc.’s plans to restore the sea, her mind flitting through worst-case scenarios: what if he was still trapped in the Clusterous Forest? What if the water began to rise around him, and he drowned?
To which Cleo had replied, kindly but with a noticeable bit of exasperation, that Snicket was too resourceful to allow that to happen.
After that day, Moxie had resolved to put him out of her mind forever. She’d even typed out a symbolic contract for herself and signed it: I, Moxie Mallahan, swear from this day forward to direct my thoughts to the present instead of the past. This is what any sensible journalist does. I will not, under any circumstances, dwell on the fate of Lemony Snicket.
The contract still existed and was now buried somewhere in the many piles of typewritten paper she’d left around her living space. But thoughts, much like actions, are difficult to govern with a piece of paper, and it was at least once a month—and sometimes as often as once a week—that Moxie broke the vow she had made to herself.
Snicket would be an adult now, she caught herself thinking tonight, if he were still alive.
She’d never been able to decide whether she’d prefer to imagine him alive or dead. Alive, and her former friend and associate was still out there somewhere, probably doing something critical for his secret organization and making witty remarks about vocabulary. Dead, and…there was no point in thinking of him anymore. Which made it easier to keep her contract.
But then her traitorous imagination would assault her with images of a twelve-year-old boy’s corpse at the bottom of the sea, and she’d feel the urge to cry and realize that her strategy hadn’t really worked.
So Snicket, in her mind, was in a constant state of limbo. Schrödinger’s Snicket. Both alive and dead, sometimes one more than the other when the occasion suited it.
It occurred to her that playing with a person’s life like this might be immoral. She blamed Erwin Schrödinger.
On this night, it was Snicket occupying her thoughts again. She justified this by saying to herself that a good journalist will never be able to forget a good mystery, no matter how personal. Moxie had known Snicket for several months and had still felt, by the end, that she knew only about ten percent of the person he was.
You don’t ever see the hidden depths of murderers, do you? It’s always the people you least expect that—
A sharp knocking distantly below her startled her out of her thoughts.
Moxie peered over the railing to see something wholly unexpected at this hour: Daniel Leon, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s latest hire at the post office, standing impatiently at her front door. Danny had been her mailman for about three months now, and he’d always been diligent and punctual, delivering the lighthouse’s mail at precisely noon each day and trading it for the latest shipment of newspaper copies, which he’d then transfer to the post office for delivery. He did the same thing every day, like clockwork, with a smile on his face.
He never, ever showed up at the lighthouse at eleven-thirty at night, looking markedly agitated.
Danny knocked at the door again, this time a bit more urgently. It would make sense for me to be asleep at this hour, Moxie considered. If I hadn’t decided to do some thinking, he might not even have been able to reach me until morning. What’s so important that it needs delivering now?
“Danny?” she called down aloud.
The boy nearly jumped out of his skin and looked upward frantically. “God?!” he shouted.
Moxie stifled a laugh. “Not exactly, Danny. Up here.”
He squinted up at the top of the lighthouse in the dim moonlight, then finally seemed to spot her. “Oh, Miss Mallahan! There you are. Startled me out of my wits, you did.” He adjusted his vest and continued calling up to her. “Apologies, but I’ve got special orders that something must be delivered to you tonight. Very urgent, the delivery instructions said. Whatever bloke sent you this must’ve paid extra to have it shipped quick.”
She paused for a moment, wondering. Moxie wondered about things frequently, but it had been quite a while since one of those wonderings had involved her directly. “Who sent it?”
“Dunno, Miss Mallahan. There’s no return address.”
That was even odder. “Okay, I’ll be down shortly,” she called down uncertainly.
“Good thinking. My voice is getting a bit tired from shouting to you!”
He grinned broadly at her like he usually did, and she returned the smile before beginning the long trek down the stairs of the lighthouse.
She had been navigating the spiral staircase of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only lighthouse since before she could walk. When little toddler Moxie had learned to crawl, her parents had unsuccessfully tried to keep her off the steps. One heart-stopping night, they’d found her up in the lantern room, right as rain, and they’d thanked whatever deity might be listening that she hadn’t found her way between the bars of the railing and fallen seven stories. After that, they kept a closer eye on their daughter until she was no longer small enough for the top of the lighthouse to be dangerous.
Moxie’s mother had enjoyed teasing her about that story. She wondered absently how such a terrifying experience could become so funny later. Some harrowing incidents decayed over time into a joke. Others did not. What was the determining factor?
By the time she reached her front door, she had managed to redirect her thoughts to the delivery at hand. She opened the door to see, as expected, Danny standing there, still seeming a little confused and oddly concerned. He was intently studying the package he had in his hands, testing its weight as if it were a metal tool or a wrapped gift.
“I’m just as curious about it as you are,” he remarked without looking up. “No return address, no label for the contents, no nothing. You sure you didn’t order a package, Miss Mallahan?”
She nodded. “Anything I need, I can usually get here in town. May I see the package?”
He shrugged and handed it to her. It was a hefty boxish thing, wrapped in nondescript brown paper and a length of cheap twine that was neatly knotted at the center in a cross. Really, it did look to Moxie like some sort of birthday present wrapped by someone who hated all manner of color or pizazz.
What struck her immediately, though, was that the package was flexible. Its contents bent slightly in her hands, almost like a piece of paper. Or, she thought, a stack of papers. Sure enough, the package was the exact size of a sheet of letter paper, and if she felt around the edges she could feel each individual leaf.
“A stack of papers,” she murmured aloud. A freakishly long letter? A mistakenly delivered stationery order?
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too, when they handed me the package at the post office. Is this your tax forms? I’m not old enough to do my taxes yet, but Ma told me that they send you lots and lots of forms.”
“Not this many.”
She turned the package over in her hands, searching for some kind of label. Nothing, save for a stamp with some piece of Renaissance art on it and a sticker with her name and address carefully typed out. Ms. Moxie Mallahan, the sticker read. The Mallahan Lighthouse, Caravel Ave., Stain’d-by-the-Sea.
“I should really get home and finish my shift so I can get some sleep,” Danny remarked, yawning. “Make sure to tell me what’s in that parcel later, okay? Heaven knows I want to see it just as much as you do.”
“I will,” Moxie promised, reaching into her pocket for a bill. “Sorry for the trouble, Danny. Here’s some cash to make up for it.”
“Nah, it’s fine,” he scoffed, but he took the bill gratefully. “Won’t turn down a tip though. I’m working the late-night shift for a pal of mine.”
“That’s a noble thing to do,” Moxie remarked. “Take care, Danny.”
“Take care, Miss Mallahan,” he replied cheerily, and then he was walking back down the drive, bag on his shoulder. Moxie turned her attention to the package in her hands and shut the front door.
She studied the typeface of the address label. Elite #8, she noted. Worn ink ribbon. Moxie was something of a legend among her employees for being able to recognize a typewriter model by just its font, though that wasn’t exactly true—she just happened to be familiar with so many different fonts that she could narrow down fairly quickly where and when a typewriter was from. This one, she knew, had probably been an Olympia typewriter, perhaps an SM3.
The SM3 was a nice, practical model. Whoever had sent this to her had good taste in typewriters, at least.
Still staring at it, she brought the package to her kitchen table, sat down, and carefully untied the twine. The paper wrapping was hastily taped shut, so she was able to tear it off easily. About a hundred sheets of paper sat there in a neat stack, stamped with paragraph upon paragraph of typewritten words. The top page read, simply:
Working Title
She skimmed the text. The paragraphs were set like those of a novel, alternating description with dialogue. Someone had scribbled page numbers on the corner of each sheet of paper.
A manuscript.
A manuscript?
Who would have sent me…?
As she flipped to the end of the work, she noticed that a postcard-sized piece of stationery, bearing a handwritten message, had been slipped between two of the pages. Narrowing her eyes with curiosity, Moxie drew the paper from its resting place.
Her heart nearly stopped.
Moxie, the note began. I'm sorry to
She looked away. She couldn't go on reading this. Not this note, in this messy script. Not after nearly twenty years had gone by. A joke. This had to be some cruel prank. Or maybe she misremembered what his handwriting looked like.
Needless to say, she couldn't keep her eyes from the note for very long.
I'm sorry to reach out to you entirely out of the blue, but you are one of the finest writers and finest editors I have ever known. Please find enclosed a recent, incredibly important work of mine, the title of which I still can't decide. Perhaps you could think of a good one.
This book cannot fall into the hands of anyone but you. Not yet. But I desperately need an editor, a word which here means “someone who understands the natural flow of language better than I do,” and the number of people I would trust with this work is dwindling each day. It shouldn't take you long to proofread; it's a mere novella, if anything.
Beneath this manuscript are two train tickets to the city. An associate of mine will be coming to collect the work from you outside the Fourier Library two weeks from this Saturday at two-thirty in the afternoon.
If you would rather destroy this manuscript and never think of it again, I understand. I have extra copies, so do with this one what you will, as long as it reaches your eyes only. If you are not present at the library at the scheduled time, I will know that you have decided against interacting with my work. No disdain will come of this decision, I promise. I remember the way things ended.
The one thing I must ask of you is that you do not go looking for me. That investigation, like our last meeting, will only end in despair. You are a journalist, and I know it pains you to intentionally leave an opportunity like this alone—but believe me when I say that some mysteries are best left unsolved.
I hear that Stain’d-by-the-Sea is doing better these days. I am nearly drained of all hope, much like the sea, but the notion that a nearly extinct town has been able to come back to life has given me enough extra hope to hope that you still live there.
Give the others my regards.
The note wasn’t signed. It didn’t need to be.
Moxie Mallahan sat there dumbfoundedly, her heart pounding in her chest, as the note fell silently from her nerveless hands.
The box had been opened. Schrödinger’s cat had been observed and was, without doubt, alive .