When time goes wrong in the village, three teenagers follow the fog to the edge of the Misty Forest and the strange clockmaker everyone fears.
The Misty Forest gave back only fragments to anyone who entered it: a silver branch glimpsed between the trunks, a patch of moss that swallowed a footprint, the hush of fog sliding over the ground like something alive. At its edge stood the workshop of Mr Loston, the clockmaker nobody in the village claimed to know. No one could agree where he had come from, or how long he had been there. Only one thing was certain: people who crossed his threshold came away with a different understanding of time.
Anka never believed that kind of talk. At thirteen, with her wild red hair and her habit of charging first and thinking later, she liked stories best when they tried to frighten her. Kuba believed all of them, which made him the best person to ask when you wanted a legend recited exactly as it had been told a hundred times before. Lena, quiet and sharp-eyed, believed almost nothing until she had tested it herself. That morning, though, the village had given them no chance to argue.
Every clock had gone wrong at once. Grandfather clocks jerked backwards. Pocket watches stopped dead. Church bells rang long after they should have fallen silent, then began again without warning. Some people swore the sun itself had hesitated above the rooftops. By noon, everyone in the village was saying the same name in the same uneasy whisper: Mr Loston.
The fog thickened as the three friends followed the path into the trees. His hut appeared at the forest’s edge at last, small and dark beneath the branches, its door set with a clock instead of a handle. The clock had no numbers. Its face shone like wet glass, and its hands were spinning in opposite directions.
Kuba lifted a hand, then froze. 'Lena,' he said softly, 'it’s moving faster when we look at it.'
Anka leaned closer. In the glassy surface of the dial, she did not see her own reflection. She saw a girl she had never met, standing in a long cloak, staring back as if she had been waiting for them.
Before any of them could step away, a voice came from inside the hut, calm and close.
'You’ve arrived earlier than I expected. Come in, before time changes its mind.'
The clock-hand on the door gave one sharp, impossible twitch, and the wooden door swung open by itself.