Before street lamps, before police, cities paid night watchmen to walk the dark with a lantern and call the hours. "Twelve o'clock, and all's well."
Everyone thought they were guarding against thieves.
They weren't. Between the moment a clock strikes and the moment a human voice calls the hour there is a gap, and in that gap every night that has ever happened touches every other. Then the cities stopped calling. Every hour nobody calls stays a little open.
Hob Lanthorn has walked York's streets with a horn lantern every night since 1752. Tonight the clocks go back, and the ring of uncalled hours hanging over the city is nearly full. If it closes, every night that ever happened becomes tonight, here, for good. Hob needs a second voice, so he recruits Lark Kettlewell, a ghost-walk guide in a charity-shop cape who has never seen so much as a draught.
Through the open hours come thirty-six nights. An Edo maid who kept a ghost's lantern lit. A Fox sister's confession, with something in the room still knocking. The voice of the Paris speaking clock, and the one o'clock a dead man wired just for her. A Soviet night train where the attendant keeps her own list. A Kyoto security guard and the hour of the ox. Gogol's dead girl tells her side of the third night. A Victorian knocker-up is hired to wake a man by a woman who died years ago. A space station waits for the dawn to be called.
And something small with a light is following Hob and Lark one street behind, getting closer every hour.
No one goes home before the hour is called.
