The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  Buckles. Section Thirteen. Impossible.

  “Oh dear. You have made a bit of a scene.” Gwen tugged at his arm. “We really must keep moving.”

  Jack resisted her pull. “Why? It’s warmer right here. Isn’t that what you wanted?” Down below, the man with the phone followed them with his eyes, muttering into the receiver. Jack heard his last name again, and the words Section Thirteen.

  The clerk dragged him onward until Jack finally took a long stride and stepped in front of her, blocking her path. He pulled his sister close, draping his arms protectively around her. “We’re not going any farther until you tell us what’s going on.”

  Gwen chewed her bottom lip, shooting a worried glance at the man below, who had just hung up the phone. “He called the wardens. Please, Jack. We don’t have much time. There’s a computer up here you should be able to access. Once wardens get here, the ministry won’t—”

  Sadie stomped her feet. “What ministry?”

  The clerk gave the eight-year-old one of her quick, freckle-bounce smiles. “Your father’s ministry, of course. The Ministry of Trackers.”

  Chapter 11

  “DADDY IS A minister?”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Ministry means something different here, Sadie.” He frowned at Gwen. “And our dad was a salesman, an American salesman.”

  “That was his cover.” Gwen motioned for them both to keep their voices down. “Your dad was a member of a secret society of detectives that has served the Crown for centuries—one of Britain’s four Elder Ministries. He was looking for an important artifact when—”

  Sadie couldn’t be bothered with such details. Her face lit up. “You know our daddy?”

  “She doesn’t know anything. She’s making it all up.” Jack needed to get his sister away from this person, back to the hotel, where he could calm her down and keep her distracted until his mom got back. “Show us the way out, Gwen. Right now.”

  “No.” Sadie wriggled free of her brother’s grasp and turned to face him. “Gwen knows our dad. She knows how to find him.” The eight-year-old folded her arms and raised her voice. “I’m not going home without Daddy!”

  If any eyes in the Chamber had not been fixed on the three children, they were now. Jack clenched his teeth. He couldn’t take any more of his sister’s clueless denial. He couldn’t take any more of his mom’s sad, fake smiles. He wanted everything out in the open. “Dad isn’t lost, Sadie. Grown men don’t just disappear.” He raised his voice so all the crazies looking on could hear. “Not in this century.”

  “But . . . we came here to find him. We came to find Daddy and bring him home.”

  “Jack,” said Gwen in a warning tone. “Don’t do this—not right now.”

  The dam was already broken.

  Jack shot a look at the clerk that said, Stay out of this, and squatted down to his sister’s level. “Try to understand. There was an accident. The London police found Dad’s wallet at the scene. By the time we flew in and Mom got to the hospital, the body was gone—a mix-up with all their ridiculous British forms and British procedures.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the wrecking ball fly. “Sadie, Mom is out searching the morgues right now. Dad is dead.”

  “No.” Sadie backed into Gwen, tears welling up in her eyes. “You’re lying. He’s alive. I know he is. I’m going to find him.”

  “Sadie . . .” Jack reached for his sister, but she shrank away from his grasp and ran around him. Halfway down the balcony, she took a left and vanished through a set of double doors.

  Gwen scowled at Jack as the doors swung closed. “That was well handled.”

  “What’s in that room?” he asked, scowling right back.

  The clerk’s expression softened. “Sadie’s going to be okay, Jack. She’s strong. I can see that.”

  She hadn’t answered his question. She never answered his questions. “What is in that room?”

  Gwen bit her lip. “We call it the Graveyard.”

  “The Graveyard?”

  “Not a real graveyard. I mean, it’s not like we keep any bodies back there.” Her eyes drifted to the double doors. “Not that many bodies, anyway.”

  “You’re nuts. All of you. I’m going to get her.”

  Gwen’s eyes shifted past him. “Too late.”

  Jack turned and came nose-to-chest with a big teen wearing a tweed jacket and sporting a blond crew cut. “You’re not s’posed to be ’ere,” he said, poking a thick finger into Jack’s chest. He was huge, with abnormally broad shoulders, though the blemishes on his plump cheeks told Jack he couldn’t be more than sixteen.

  “Um . . . Excuse me. I—”

  Big-pimply-tweed guy scowled down at him. “Shut it, you.”

  “Jack, meet Shaw,” said Gwen with a sigh. “He’s a warden—a journeyman warden, to be exact—kind of like a museum guard in training. He’s here to collect us. Aren’t you, Shaw?”

  Shaw’s scowl shifted to the clerk. “You ’ad no right to bring him into the Chamber on your own. Why din’tcha call Mrs. ’udson?”

  “I was only trying to help . . . sort of. And why shouldn’t he know who he really is?”

  Shaw let out a scathing guffaw. “Not for you to decide, is it? You’re a first-year ’prentice clerk—barely got clearance to enter the broom closet, let alone the Chamber.”

  Apparently that was enough to shame the clerk. Her eyes dropped to the floor as Shaw put a meaty hand on each of their shoulders. “Right. Both of you wi’ me, now. Off we go.”

  Jack felt little pinpricks on his back. He craned his neck to look and saw a huge, blue-green beetle. Was it . . . made of metal? It twitched its wings and Jack could swear he saw tiny copper gears poking out beneath. The bug looked back at him with unexpected intelligence, focusing eyes made of miniature camera lenses, then twitched its antennae and crawled over his shoulder, right onto the big guy’s hand.

  Chapter 12

  SHAW YANKED HIS hand away with a cry worthy of a ten-year-old girl, flinging the beetle into the air. It stabilized with its iridescent wings beating at breakneck speed, hovering directly in front of Shaw’s bulbous nose and making his eyes cross. He swatted at it, but the bug darted to an empty workstation. As soon as it landed on the keyboard, the display embedded in the wall above came to life. Lines of raw computer code cascaded down the screen.

  The big guy growled, attempting to grab the clockwork pest, but a purple arc of electricity flashed out and zapped his hand. He yelped and clutched his paw, eliciting a giggle from Gwen. Even Jack had to suppress a laugh, but the levity was short-lived.

  Aaaht! Aaaht! Aaaht! Aaaht!

  A blaring alarm echoed through the Chamber. The lights went out and every screen at every workstation flashed red, strobing in the dark. The revolving-door-Tube voice added to the chaos. “System breach. System breach.”

  The room swirled in Jack’s vision. Nausea gathered in his stomach. Shaw glared down at him with a scowl worthy of a Gothic gargoyle, terrifying in the flashing, blood-red light. “Wot’s it doin’, you?”

  “I don’t know!” Jack covered his ears with his hands. “Not my bug. I swear!”

  The big guy hauled back with an open palm, and Jack thought he was going to hit him, but then he turned and swatted the bug, gritting his teeth through a second purple flash of electricity and making contact with an ugly crunch. The beetle sailed through the balcony rail, wobbling off over the desks in a zigzagging, wounded-bug flight path. Shaw lumbered after it, heading for the stairs. “Oi! Stop that bug!”

  Aaaht! Aaaht! Aaaht! Aaaht!

  “System breach. System breach,” continued the revolving-door-Tube voice with obnoxious calm. Then her message changed. “Unauthorized access in class five storage . . . Lockdown initiated . . . Mind the doors, please.”

  Clang. Somewhere in the Chamber, a vault door closed. Clang. Another one. The computer was sealing them in.

  A mini-drone zipped out from the same dark stairwell where the first one had disappeare
d, carrying in its pincers a hardened case the size of a basketball. A worker in a waistcoat leaped up to grab it, but the drone evaded him and continued its climb, heading for the far end of the balcony, where another vault door was already swinging closed.

  “The bug hacked into a drone,” gasped Gwen, taking off to intercept it.

  Jack fought back his nausea and ran too, not to chase the drone, but to get to his sister. He skidded to a stop at the Graveyard and pushed open the double doors. Inside was a kind of warehouse, a huge room filled with row after row of tall oak shelving units, crammed with odds and ends. Those closest to him were packed from top to bottom with worn-out dolls, all staring back at him with glassy, dead eyes.

  She must be terrified in there. “Sadie!”

  The eight-year-old stepped out of the shadows, one of the dolls dangling from her hand. “What’s with all the noise?”

  Jack dropped to one knee and pulled her into a hug.

  “Ow. Quit it! What’s wrong with you?”

  “You’re not upset?”

  “Not anymore.” Sadie pushed away, holding him at arm’s length. “You didn’t mean it. You’re just confused.”

  “No. Sadie, you—”

  Clang. The vault door at the end of the balcony slammed closed. Gwen sprinted toward them. “The drone got out! We can still catch it. There’s one more exit!”

  The clerk grabbed Jack’s hand, yanking him into the Graveyard. He, in turn, pulled his sister with him, and her glassy-eyed doll brought up the rear. On the other side, across a hundred feet of shelves and plush red carpet, a pair of huge sliding doors slowly converged.

  One more exit. Gwen’s words finally sank in. Those doors were about to block their only way out—the only way to get Sadie back to the safety of the hotel. Jack stopped letting Gwen pull him along and committed to the race.

  Strange images registered in his addled brain as he ran—busts of historic figures topped with ill-fitting wigs, old tin toys, dozens of umbrellas protruding from brass cylinders like bouquets of flowers. Seated at the end of the last shelf before the doors was a creepy clown, a pocked and scarred ventriloquist’s dummy with sneering red lips and eyes that followed him as he passed.

  “Come on!” The doors were almost closed. Gwen let go for the final sprint.

  Jack sped up as well, but Sadie’s legs were too short to match. She stumbled and fell, her tiny hand slipping out of his. He looked back, something he did not have the coordination to get away with. Jack tripped over his own feet, smacked his head against one of the closing doors, and stumbled through into the loading bay. The last thing he heard before darkness fell was the echoing bang of the doors coming together, leaving his little sister trapped on the other side with the glassy-eyed dolls and the creepy clown.

  Chapter 13

  JACK KEPT HIS eyes closed, hoping it was all a bad dream. Sure, his head throbbed with pain. But he got headaches all the time, and they were never the result of intruder alarms or injuries sustained in narrow escapes. Maybe he was still lying in the hotel room. Maybe this whole, crazy morning had been a nightmare. Isn’t that what nightmares were, all gargoyles and creepy clowns and running for your life without knowing why? All strangeness and no answers?

  “Jack?”

  No such luck. He opened one eye to see Gwen standing over him, offering him a hand. He groaned. “Go away.”

  “Get up. We have to catch the drone.”

  Jack struggled to his feet without accepting her help, and saw that they had escaped into a loading bay of sorts, filled with racks of old winter clothing. Daylight seeped in around the edges of a corrugated steel garage door. He clapped a hand to his pounding head. “Sadie.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “She’s not fine. She’s trapped in there with the alarm and Big-pimply-gargoyle guy.”

  “You mean Shaw?” Gwen scrunched up her nose. “Don’t be so melodramatic. Shaw is harmless . . . sort of. And Mrs. Hudson is with them. She’s wonderful with children.”

  Before Jack could argue the Mrs.-Hudson-is-great-with-kids point, Gwen yanked down on a chain, hauling up the door and blinding him with daylight. By the time his eyes adjusted, she was rummaging through the racks. She pulled a midnight-blue racing jacket from a hanger and shoved it into his chest. “Put this on. It’s cold outside.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without my sister,” he argued, but he was cold, so he donned the coat anyway. As he looked up from the zipper, he got hit in the face with a wool cap.

  “That too. Stiff breeze today. No need to catch a sniffle.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He pulled the cap down over his ears. “Why on earth would I want to help you?”

  The clerk stormed across the bay, rising up on her toes to get into his face. “You can’t possibly be this dense!” she shouted, really shouted, for the first time since he had met her. “Intruder alarms, beetles that hack into computers—you think it’s a coincidence that it all happened the moment you walked into the Lost Property Office? It all happened because you walked in.” She stayed there, nostrils flaring for another long second, then finally backed down and looked away. “You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  “Yeah. I know. I heard Shaw.”

  Gwen shook her head. “You don’t understand. When the ministry loses an agent, they put up a smokescreen, shuffle things around for a week or two until they’ve built a proper cover story. Your mum should never have heard from the police. You and your sister should never have set foot in London. Jack, all of this—the bug, the drone—all of it has something to do with your dad’s last mission.” She shrugged. “Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”

  A cold feeling churned in Jack’s stomach. His eyes fell to his shoes. “I . . . I mean . . .”

  “Oh. You really don’t want to know.” Gwen had clearly not considered that possibility. “Well, I don’t think you have a choice anymore. That mission is what brought you here, Jack. You’re involved whether you want to be or not.”

  “Fine.” He sighed. “Whatever. So what am I supposed to do about it?”

  The clerk put on a set of purple earmuffs and walked outside, pausing to look back from the bay door. “It’s better if I show you.”

  The light but unmistakable scent of mothballs hung over Jack like a cloud as he followed Gwen up the sidewalk. “Hey!” he said to the clerk’s back. “I know where this coat came from. And this hat, and your earmuffs, and all the rest of that stuff back there. It’s obvious. This stuff is used—lost. So what does your secret Ministry of Trackers have to do with a lost and found?”

  Gwen’s shoulders hunched at the words lost and found, but she did not break stride. She reached back and grabbed his arm, pulling him up beside her. “We are not a lost and found. Stop saying that. The Lost Property Office is the public intersect of a much larger, secret organization. Think of it as the tip of an iceberg that innocently bobs above the surface, concealing the much larger bit below.”

  They stopped at the edge of a short brick alley. There, lying on a pile of rubble at the back, was the drone. It had crashed through a false brick wall from the other side—a secret panel, now broken to pieces to expose the vault door behind it. Apparently the runaway drone had made it all of four feet after it escaped the Chamber.

  Gwen hurried to the crash site and knelt down to poke through the remains. “Someone has already recovered the crate. We have to move fast.” She stood and manhandled Jack, positioning him at the center of the alley. “Okay. Tell me what you see.”

  “I see a wrecked drone on a pile of bricks . . .” He glanced at her sideways. “And a crazy person.”

  The clerk was not amused. She grabbed his face in her hands, pulling it down so that his eyes were level with hers. “I thought you decided to help.”

  “Yeah, I did,” he said, pulling himself free. “But I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “You know that you’re special, Jack.
You’ve always known it. You can see and hear things that others can’t, just like your dad. Now, tell me what you see.”

  Jack sighed. He did know, even if he didn’t want to admit it. As Gwen moved out of the way, he narrowed his eyes, straining to see what he was missing. Street noises echoed off the alley walls, hitting his brain in spikes of color. He covered his ears to block them out, but Gwen immediately pulled his hands away. “No. Not like that. Stop trying to see like everyone else does.” She let go of his wrists and stepped back. “See things your way, Jack. Open your senses—all your senses. Let the world in.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just do as I say, please.”

  The flood of data washed over him. Asphalt, bricks, honking horns, shadows, scent of oil, scent of dust, bits of white wreckage, mothballs—all coming too fast. That had always been the problem. Too much, too quickly. He tried to compress the information into a narrow stream and winced as pain crept in from the edges of his mind.

  “Stop fighting it.” Gwen paced behind him. “Pressure puts the barriers up. Relax. Let them fall.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I read a lot. Trust me, Jack.”

  He let go of his annoyance with the clerk and committed to her words. He stopped trying to control the data coming in. And, for the first time that he could remember, Jack saw.

  All at once, the fast-moving stream burst into a wide, three-dimensional field of data, every piece slowing to a crawl. Jack saw more than brick walls—he saw the bricks themselves, a hundred shades of red and brown fitting together in rectangular jigsaw puzzles. At his feet, the asphalt separated into whorls and blotches in a dozen shades of black. The sounds from the street that had so distracted him before became part of the picture as well. He watched, literally watched, the honks of multiple car horns echo off the walls in shimmering bronze waves—some thick and palpable, others thin and fading. The gray murmur of engine noises drifted around his ankles like ground fog.