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 Lighthousehad 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
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