The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  To Jack’s amazement, the whole column shifted down, revealing more cubbies that were hidden in the wall above. Dozens flashed by to the sound of clicking gears. He blinked. “Um. No. You don’t understand. He’s—”

  “Lost in a park, on public transport . . . lost in a residence, on the street?” She read more labels as the column clicked to a stop.

  Sadie gave a little shrug. “We don’t know.”

  “Quiet. You’re not helping.” Jack grabbed the braided lip of the podium and pulled himself up on his toes. A brass nameplate sat on the desktop amid the garlands.

  MRS. HUDSON

  MANAGER: BAKER STREET

  1887–PRESENT

  1887. Was that the year the branch was founded, or the year she started working there? Jack raised his voice to get this Mrs. Hudson’s attention. “Excuse me. Our dad is—”

  “Lost in general?” she asked without turning around. “I see. That would require a form twenty-six-B-two if we’re going to be as thorough as we ought.” She straightened and held her finger to her chin, muttering to herself. “Which way? Which way? Where is that clerk? She’s the one who files these things.” She wheeled around and shouted at the empty room. “Kincaid!”

  Jack lost his grip on the podium and fell flat on his rear with a pronounced “Umph!”

  While Sadie helped him to his feet, Mrs. Hudson continued to stare out into the office, oblivious to the whole episode. She stood there for several seconds, hands on her hips, waiting for the invisible clerk to materialize, until she finally furrowed her brow and turned back to the cubbies. “Right, then. Still up to me. As always.” She raised a long finger in the air, hooked it into a cubby, and gave it a good flick to the right. The row flew sideways, much like the column had flown down. Jack and Sadie exchanged a wide-eyed look. There seemed to be an infinite supply of cubbies behind the wall.

  When the clicking slowed to a stop, Mrs. Hudson reached into the compartment directly in front of her and pulled out a large stack of green forms. These she attached to a clipboard. Then she touched a pen to her tongue and began filling out the first page.

  Jack was thankful for the break in her momentum. “Please listen. All we need are directions back to our hotel.”

  Mrs. Hudson’s eyes jerked up from the page. “Excuse me?”

  “We . . . um . . . only need directions to our hotel.”

  Mrs. Hudson set the pen down and leaned forward, raising the spectacles again. Through the closely spaced lenses, her eyes looked huge and slightly crossed. “Lost way. That is another form entirely.” Straightening, she flipped the clipboard around and tapped the top line with her spectacles. “Unfortunately, I have already initiated the twenty-six-B-two enquiry. Once initiated, all forms must be completed.”

  “But—”

  “If you would like to terminate the twenty-six-B-two enquiry, you may also fill out a ninety-nine-A cancellation.” Mrs. Hudson reached back into the cubbies and drew out a stack of pink pages. “After which, you may fill out a twenty-one-C request for—”

  Jack held up his hands. “No! The green one is fine. That’s all we need.”

  With a nod, Mrs. Hudson set the pink pages back in their place. “Yes. I think that’s best.” She handed both the pen and the clipboard to Jack. “You and your sister are American, is that correct?”

  “We . . . um—”

  “Yes will suffice, child. In that case, I expect you will need a bit of help.” Keeping her eyes fixed on Jack, and with no warning whatsoever, she brought her hands down on the podium with a heavy slap. “Kincaid!”

  Jack would have fallen back onto his rear again if not for a steadying hand from his little sister. He frowned up at the old woman. When was she going to figure out that this Kincaid person did not exist?

  “Yes, Mrs. Hudson?”

  Jack spun around. Standing at the door was a blond, freckled girl about his own age.

  Chapter 8

  “KINCAID,” SAID MRS. Hudson, “this young man and his sister need to complete a twenty-six-B-two. See that they do it correctly.” Her voice flattened. “They’re Americans.”

  A door opened and closed, indicating that Mrs. Hudson had gone, but Jack’s eyes were still on the once-imaginary-and-now-very-real clerk. She was far too young for government work—or maybe the smattering of freckles that dotted her pinkish cheeks made her look young. Either way, she didn’t belong in this office from a bygone era. Unlike Mrs. Hudson, Kincaid was dressed for the present, wearing a gray wool coat that hung down to her knees, where black leggings took over. Her honey-blond hair fell down over a purple-and-black-striped scarf that bunched around her shoulders and threatened to swallow her chin. In short, she looked perfectly normal for a young girl on a December morning. Jack needed a little normal after Mrs. Hudson.

  Without a word, the girl removed a purple cotton glove and held out her hand. Jack wasn’t sure if he was supposed to shake it or kiss it, this being England and all. He opted for a gentle shake. “Hi . . . I’m Jack. And this is my sister, Sadie.”

  “Right.” The girl gave him a quick, awkward smile that made the freckles on her cheeks rise and fall. “Lovely. And I’m Gwen. Gwen Kincaid. But could you . . . ?” She kept her hand extended, wiggling her fingers, indicating that she wanted the clipboard.

  Jack’s cheeks flushed as he handed it over.

  “Very good.” She turned on her heels and headed for a bench at the other end of the office. Jack and Sadie obediently followed.

  A plan formed in Jack’s head. This girl appeared sane, something he could not say for the old woman. If he could make a connection, maybe he could get her to dump the paperwork altogether. He sat down between the girls, leaving a respectful distance between himself and Gwen. “So . . . you’re a clerk? I mean, shouldn’t you be in school or something?”

  “Apprentice clerk, actually. Age twelve.” Gwen set the clipboard down between them and unraveled her scarf, one hand twirling in a circle above her head, making a purple-and-black pattern flash before her face. “The ministry identifies its recruits during key stage three—what you Americans call middle school. It’s an advanced work-study program.” She finished unraveling and turned to hang the scarf on a hook between the bench and the window.

  “The ministry?” asked Sadie, leaning out from behind her brother.

  Jack pushed her out of view before the clerk turned back again. A bunch of little-girl questions would only derail the conversation. “Wow. Work-study,” he said with a sympathetic nod. “Work and study at the same time. You sound really busy.” He reached for the forms. “You know, my sister and I don’t mind skipping all this paperwork if that would help you out. All we need are some directions.”

  Just as Jack’s fingers grazed the clipboard, Gwen snatched it away.

  “Can’t. Rule ninety-seven.”

  Normal and sane had left the building. They had probably never been there in the first place. Jack cringed, hardly daring to ask. “Rule ninety-seven?”

  “Ministry regulations, volume three, section one, rule ninety-seven: ‘All forms, once initiated, must be completed.’ ” Gwen waved the pen at Jack like a teacher’s pointer. “An incomplete form is simply a mess of unanswered questions. And we can’t have those, can we?”

  “What ministry?” insisted Sadie, popping out from behind Jack again.

  Once again, he pushed her back. “Um . . . no. I guess we can’t.”

  Crazy-clerk girl scrunched up her nose. “I’ll just fill in the easy boxes for you, shall I?”

  As she scribbled away, Jack’s eyes wandered, searching for something, anything, that would help him make sense of the situation. His gaze fell on the window displays—the old vinyl records, the top hat, a pair of brass driving goggles. All at once his brain made the connection. These weren’t merely old items. They were old unclaimed items. They were lost property.

  “Look,” he said, adjusting his tone to take on a little more authority. “I don’t see how this department . . . ministr
y . . . whatever . . . can help with a missing person. I mean—the Lost Property Office—you guys are really just a lost and found, aren’t you?”

  The pen ground to a halt and the clerk looked up, freckles dropping into a dark frown. “We are not a lost and found. Do you really think we sit around all day waiting for all things lost and all those who lost them to magically show up on our doorstep?”

  Jack’s eyes shifted from Gwen to the antiques behind her and back. “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Hmph. What a lazy, American concept.” She returned her attention to the clipboard. “Now. If we might continue, why don’t we start with the name of the missing person?”

  “John,” said Jack, letting out a defeated sigh. “His name is John.”

  “Full name, please.”

  “John Buckles.” Jack lowered his voice a little. “The Second.”

  “John . . . Bu-ckles . . . the . . . Sec—” Gwen stopped mid-scribble, staring at the name for two full heartbeats before looking up at Jack. “And that would make you . . .”

  Sadie hopped off the bench, dodging her brother’s already reaching arm. “John Buckles the Third,” she said, grinning proudly. “It’s a family tradition.”

  “Of course it is.” Gwen stood up, suddenly lost in a fog. Her eyes drifted over to the empty podium and remained there several seconds, as if waiting for Mrs. Hudson to appear, but she never did. When the clerk finally returned her attention to Jack, she gave him another quick, awkward smile—another bounce of her freckles. “Cold, isn’t it?”

  Jack had not seen that one coming. “Um . . . what?”

  “Cold. You . . . Me . . . You, especially.” The clerk nodded at the street outside. “You know, blustery winter day meets drafty old office.” She snatched her scarf from the hook and clutched it to her chest. “Brrrr. You must be freezing. I know I am.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “We should continue this in the back office. Much warmer back there. Much more comfortable.” She winked, which really unnerved him, then circled around to the other side of the bench, backing up until she bumped into a wreath hanging on the wall next to the counter. After another quick glance at the empty podium, she locked eyes with Jack and pushed the wood panel open, wreath and all. There was nothing but darkness beyond.

  “Please, Jack. I need you and your sister to come with me, right now.”

  Chapter 9

  THE PANEL CLICKED closed, leaving the three of them in total darkness. Gwen had ushered them into a tiny, L-shaped room, no bigger than a broom closet. Sadie held tight to her brother’s arm. “Jack, is this okay?”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Gwen?”

  “Patience, please.” The bureaucratic superiority in the clerk’s voice had returned. “There’s a light switch around here somewhere. See if it’s on your end. Around the corner.”

  Above the sound of Gwen’s hand sliding along the wall, searching for the switch, Jack thought he heard a rapid clicking, like six tiny legs skittering across a hardwood floor. But strange sounds and feelings often crept across Jack’s mind when the lights went out, and he had gotten used to ignoring them. He dismissed the clicking as a trick of the dark and shuffled around the corner, reaching blindly in front of him until the tips of his fingers bumped into cold steel. The metal felt strange, almost malleable—another trick of the dark. Maybe. As Jack flattened his palm, his skin seemed to sink into the surface, like pressing an imprint into clay.

  Then things got really weird.

  Jack sensed vibrations. The individual molecules of the steel quivered against his skin, forming a uniform pattern, like Morse code but millions of times faster and infinitely more complex. And Jack could swear he was on the verge of making sense of it all.

  The flood of input caused vertigo, threatening to knock him off his feet. To steady himself, he pressed even harder against the steel, and the vibrations intensified. An image snapped into his mind. Jack saw a hand pressed against a big steel door, palm flat like his. But it wasn’t his hand. It was bigger, older, with a reddish-brown cuff at the wrist.

  Suddenly the skittering-bug sound broke through from the edge of Jack’s consciousness, accompanied by the sensation of something crawling across the back of his hand. He jerked his palm away from the metal with an involuntary cry. The image of the older hand evaporated.

  “Are you all right?”

  Jack blinked. Gwen stood next to him in the small, bright room, her hand on the light switch. How long had she been there? A steel door stood in front of him, exactly as it had appeared in the vision—big and heavy. It had no handle of any kind, just a black thumb pad jutting out from the right side of the frame.

  “Jack, are you all right?” Gwen asked a second time.

  “Fine . . . I guess. But something crawled across my hand. You have a bug problem.”

  Gwen wrinkled her nose. “Ew. Don’t think so. Mrs. Hudson would never allow it.”

  “Agree to disagree. Why are we in this closet, anyway?”

  “It’s not a closet, silly.” Gwen nodded at the vault door. “It’s an entryway. The back office, remember? That’s where we’re going.”

  Jack stepped back, pulling Sadie with him so Gwen could reach the thumb pad. He knew a biometric scanner when he saw one. “All yours.”

  The clerk stared at the pad, chewing her lip, then shrugged. “Why don’t you give it a go?”

  “I can’t. I mean it won’t—” Before Jack could finish, Gwen took his right hand with hers, so abrupt and unexpected—so soft—that resisting never occurred to him. She guided his hand to the scanner and used her own thumb to press his down on the pad.

  Jack felt a mild electric shock—though he wasn’t sure if it came from the thumb pad—and a green light illuminated above the door. The familiar, revolving-door-Tube voice filled the small space. “Access granted. Welcome, John Buckles.”

  Chapter 10

  ELECTRONIC GEARS WHIRRED, followed by a deep clang, and the vault door swung wide, forcing Jack to back away. His mouth hung open. “It knew my fingerprint.”

  Gwen looked as surprised as he was, wearing a sort of I-can’t-believe-it-actually-worked expression, but she recovered quickly. “Your genetic marker, actually. You might say it recognized your bloodline.”

  “But how did it—?”

  The clerk stepped through the door. “This way, Jack. No dawdling.”

  She moved at a brisk pace, leading them onto a midlevel balcony that wrapped around a cavernous chamber the size of a train station. Everything from the floor to the thick beams of the arched ceiling was made of rich, dark oak—like the counters in the front office, except the wood here was oiled and polished, the ornate carvings still sharp. An intricate border of twisting vines ran around the ceiling. Jack could make out tiny men and women among the curling leaves, carrying lanterns or looking through spyglasses.

  “The Lost Property Office was the first public branch ever established by the ministry,” said Gwen, keeping her voice oddly low. “An agent named Doyle founded the branch in 1887, as a sort of catch-all for information and requests. We call this part the Chamber.”

  “What ministry?” asked Sadie.

  There was a heavy clang behind them. Both Americans looked back and saw that the big vault door had slammed closed, locking them in. “Um . . . Gwen?” Jack returned his eyes to the front too late to see the clerk come to an abrupt halt. He bumped into the back of her.

  She gave him a pointed frown, then handed her clipboard to a man in a pinstriped vest and white shirt, seated on a rolling stool in front of a high-definition screen with a keyboard jutting out from the wall beneath it. Similar workstations were spaced every few yards along the balcony, though few of them were manned. “File that, please,” said Gwen, her eyes shifting up and down the balcony. “Section Eighty-six protocol.”

  Pinstriped-vest man stared up at the clerk.

  “Well?” She snapped her fingers impatiently. “What are you waiting for?”

&nb
sp; He shot a furtive glance at Jack, then pulled a hidden drawer out from the wall at his knee and tossed the clipboard inside—pen, papers, and all. He shoved the drawer closed and silently swiveled back to his keyboard.

  “But we didn’t finish those,” protested Sadie. “What happened to ‘All forms must be completed’?”

  “Did I say that?” Gwen started her march again. “How silly of me.”

  Jack noticed the clerk was hugging the left side of the balcony, keeping clear of the rail. Before he could ask her why, he heard a weighty ffoomp behind him. He stopped and looked over his shoulder to see wisps of black smoke rising from the edges of the drawer.

  “Wait . . . Did he just—?”

  She was already too far ahead of him to hear.

  Looking down over the rail as he jogged to catch up, Jack saw rows of great mahogany desks lining the floor space, each topped with a brass lamp and a rotary phone. A few workers—not nearly enough to man them all—milled about between them, dressed in vintage, nineteenth-century clothing. Despite the antique look of the clothes and furniture, holographic images hovered over several of the desktops. One showed a woman wearing a dark blue peacoat and red beret, crossing a busy street. Jack grabbed the balcony rail. “Mom?”

  “Watch out!”

  Gwen was back at his side, pulling him into a crouch as a miniature drone whizzed by. The brown hardened case it carried missed his head by inches. An electric blue haze glowed within the four circular housings where the mini-drone’s rotors should have been, reflecting off the desktops as it dropped below the balcony and zipped across the Chamber. It disappeared into a dark stairwell on the other side.

  By the time Jack recovered, the projection of the woman had disappeared. The man who was seated at the desk glared up at the balcony, lifted the receiver of an ivory and brass rotary phone, and dialed. Whispers from the other workers drifted up to Jack’s ears like vapors.