The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  Jack used his platinum card to exit through the turnstiles and followed Gwen to a solitary elevator—a lift, he reminded himself—in an empty corner of the station. Instead of pressing a button, the clerk dropped twenty pence into a coin slot. The door slid open to reveal an ordinary restroom stall.

  “Mind the loo,” whispered Gwen, forcing him to squeeze between the paper dispenser and the bowl as she pushed him inside. Before Jack could ask any of the several questions running through his mind, she locked the stall door and the whole thing started upward.

  The lift-loo rose into a minute public restroom, complete with a little sink and mirror. Gwen pushed Jack out of the stall, pressing a large red button mounted above the sink, and a narrow door slid open behind him. “Give me a minute to freshen up, would you?” she said, and shoved him backward into brilliant sunlight. The door slid closed between them. A red OCCUPIED sign lit up with a discreet ding.

  Jack had emerged from a square, cinder-block structure encased in blue-tinted glass—as if colored glass could make a cinder-block toilet double as municipal art. He frowned at his own reflection, and his eyes were drawn to a real piece of art above his shoulder.

  He turned and shielded his eyes to stare up at a giant column, at least two hundred feet high and topped with a spiky gold ball. A mural carved into the square base depicted a fainting woman, lying atop the ruins of a city, with flames raging behind her. Several figures—angels, workers, and a king—came to the woman’s aid, but they all wore snobbish, disinterested expressions. Jack found the most compelling figure to be a diminutive dragon, half-hidden beneath the rubble. He seemed intelligent and resolute, trying desperately to lift the crumbling walls back into place.

  A toilet flushed and water poured into a sink. Jack turned to see Gwen, standing in the narrow doorway, drying her hands with a paper towel.

  “The secret entrance to your big station is a loo?” Jack held up two fingers of each hand to make quotation marks as he said the funny British word.

  “It’s quite convenient.” Gwen crumpled up the paper towel and tossed it into a bin as she stepped outside. The door slid closed behind her, the red LED sign changing to a blue one that read OUT OF ORDER. “Why do you think you can never get into a public lavatory in London?”

  He gave her a blank stare.

  “Right. You’ve probably never tried.”

  “What are we doing here, Gwen? How is this helping me get my dad back?”

  Instead of answering, she walked a short distance to the north, out of the square surrounding the monument. Jack followed her down off the raised, granite paving stones onto a short, cobblestone street, hidden in the shadows between an apartment building and a bank.

  Gwen reached the center of the road and turned, spreading her hands. “This is Pudding Lane.”

  Jack shrugged. “Okay . . .”

  “This is the epicenter, Jack, the place where it all began.”

  “You mean the fire.”

  She widened her eyes and nodded, clearly wanting him to come to some sort of conclusion on his own.

  “And this . . . Ember . . . is here somewhere?”

  “No, Jack.” Gwen dropped her hands and sighed. “Don’t be such a wally.”

  He frowned at her. “That’s the second time you’ve called me that—as if I even know what it means.”

  “Wally, Jack. Lost in the crowd. Out of your depth. What else would you call it?” Gwen shook her head. “You’re getting off topic. The Ember was here, and that’s the point. The ministry hunts for objects like this all the time. Weird artifacts are sort of our bread and butter. These things often have unusual qualities that are linked to catastrophes and events that changed the course of history.”

  Jack stepped deeper into the shadow of the buildings. The stones at his feet looked ancient, worn and darkened by centuries of use. “So you’re telling me this Ember may be the thing that caused the Great Fire.”

  “Either that or it was created by the fire. We can’t be certain which until we know more. But we can be certain the Ember was here, at the epicenter.”

  “And what am I supposed to do? Track it? Find clues left here hundreds of years ago?”

  She nodded. “Three hundred and fifty, to be exact.”

  Jack couldn’t believe how serious she looked, how matter-of-fact—as if she had merely asked him to go and get her a soda. “You’re nuts.”

  “For your father, Jack. For my uncle. You can do this. It’s who you are.”

  He let out a long breath, trying to quiet his mind again. “Yeah, that’s what you keep telling me.” Seeing came easier this time. Soon the jumble of inputs from the lane rose into a slow-moving field of data.

  Cobblestones: blackened with age, some worn nearly to nubs.

  Ancient grout: white, weathered away to form deep chasms between the stones.

  Lots of cigarettes and old gum: smokers and gum chewers the world over were habitual litterbugs—nothing new.

  Then Jack noticed a clicking, slow and syncopated—each almost imperceptible sound a faint, silver speck floating into his mind’s eye from somewhere to the right. There was a repeating pattern of six, one he had heard before.

  He wheeled to his right and swatted at a clockwork beetle that crept along the aluminum frame of the bank windows. It dodged his attack, leaping into the air with a grating buzz.

  Gwen groaned. “Not this again. Jack, leave it be.”

  “Go away!” he shouted, taking another futile swing. “We’re doing what you asked!” But the beetle turned the tables, diving at him, forcing him back into the lane.

  “Look out!”

  Jack realized too late that Gwen was not talking about the bug. Another buzzing sound, louder and much deeper, came in fast from the left. He saw the motorcycle in his head even before he shifted his gaze to look. The biker braked and swerved. Jack stumbled forward and tripped, falling palms first to the stones.

  The vision came hard and fast—not like the others, in which his fingers seemed to gradually sink into the cold metal. The instant Jack’s hands smacked down on the cobblestones, reams of data shot up his arms. Suddenly he was in another place, or maybe another time.

  Voices—ghostly, unintelligible echoes—bounced off stone block walls that were nothing like the apartments and the bank that had been there a moment before. The shadows around him came alive, separating into ragged, amorphous shapes that drifted past, trailing vapors of darkness. At first, he was afraid to look. Then he forced himself to focus on one approaching form and it quickly sharpened, splitting into the silhouettes of a man and a woman. Jack could swear the faceless man stared right at him as he passed, shouting something he could not understand. In the back of his mind a constant, undulating wail grew. It had the shape and flow of an air raid siren.

  The shadow couple stopped at a doorway. As the faceless man pushed the woman through, he pointed up the lane. Jack looked in time to see a monstrous black flash rise up against the white sky, accompanied by a horrendous crash. The street fell away beneath him.

  He was falling again, through the street, only to slam facedown into the cobblestones once more. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees and saw that the rushing shadows were gone. So were the echoing voices and the stone buildings, leaving him with only the wailing and the old street, and a gray-white mist hovering over the stones.

  It wasn’t mist. The stabbing scent of smoke hit his nostrils, the same scent that had nearly choked him to death in the abandoned house. The wailing became more insistent, no longer the drone of a siren. Now it sounded like voices—hundreds, maybe thousands, of miserable voices crying out in anguish.

  Jack didn’t want to be here anymore. He closed his eyes, trying to escape, but the vision of the stones and the smoke remained. He didn’t know how these things worked, how to turn them off. He tried to call out for Gwen and discovered that he had no voice. His mouth wouldn’t even open. Then he felt something cold snaking across his fingers. Black tendrils of shadow
drifted up from the white grit between the cobblestones, twisting around his wrists and crawling up his arms, forming dozens of long skeletal hands with icy grips. He tried to pull his hands away from the cobblestones, but the wraiths held him fast, pulling him down. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even scream. Then the wailing coalesced, finally forming words he could understand. “Help us, Jack. Release us!”

  Chapter 20

  “JACK!” THE GHOSTLY hands evaporated in a breath of cold wind as Gwen helped Jack up from the pavement. “Are you okay? Did that biker hit you?”

  “I’m fine.” Jack was relieved to hear his own voice. He could speak again. “At least, I think I am. How long was I out?”

  “What do you mean, ‘How long’? I rushed over as soon as you fell.”

  Sure enough, he could still hear the motorcycle fading into the distance. The accident couldn’t have happened more than a few seconds before, but the vision seemed much longer. “The beetle,” he said, still trying to clear his mind. “Was the Clockmaker here?”

  “Only his little emissary. Buzzed off for the moment.” She steadied him, brushing the dust off his shoulders. “Jack, what happened when you fell?”

  He sat down on the curb, taking great care to avoid touching the street with his bare hands. “Um . . . do trackers see things? Not like finding kerosene boot prints or visualizing fish smells, but . . . things.” He looked up at her. “You know, hallucinations?”

  Gwen’s eyes went wide. “You sparked.”

  “Whoa.” Jack held up his hands. “I did no such . . . Wait. What?”

  “You sparked.” She sat down beside him. “You got a spark of vision by touching an object. You saw something from the past—recent, distant, either one. Is that what happened?”

  He nodded dumbly.

  She nodded with him, gaze falling to the cobblestones. “Brilliant.” She was silent for several seconds.

  “Gwen?”

  “Yes?”

  He shrugged and raised his hands.

  “Oh. Right. Explanation.” Her freckles bounced and she waved a hand, gesturing at nothing in particular. “The world around us is full of memories, Jack. Light and sound get trapped in rigid materials like stone and steel—recorded like data on a disk drive. You can access that data. Your unique sensory matrix allows you to sort of . . . download the memories.”

  “You’re saying I can see movies of the past by touching random stuff.”

  “Eh . . .” The clerk wiggled a hand. “Let’s not oversimplify. Trackers can only spark on minerals, and each type yields a different result. The memory of stone runs deep, going back hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. But the sounds and images are dull—mere echoes and shadows. Steel and iron are the opposite. They retain greater detail, but the data remains shallow, near the surface. It gets overwritten quickly, like RAM on a computer.”

  “So . . . I either get shadows of the distant past, or clear images of something that just happened.”

  A nod and another freckle bounce, with a hint of slyness to it. “Unless you spark on a gemstone, a big one, like the giants of the Crown Jewels. Light penetrates deep into gemstones, and their hard, crystalline structures hold sights and sounds practically forever. Trackers have solved centuries-old murders and located the tombs of pharaohs simply by holding a famous jewel in their hands.”

  Jack slowly stood, taking a step back. He needed space to breathe, to think. “Why didn’t you tell me about this back at the Lost Property Office?”

  “It shouldn’t have come up at all. Sparking takes years of training. Even with instruction, no tracker under the age of eighteen has ever managed it.” Gwen popped up to join him. “Until you, Jack. Isn’t that brilliant!”

  He did not share her excitement. The idea of seeing the past recorded in everyday objects explained the vision of the hand at the Chamber and the vision of the Clockmaker entering the house with the blue door, but it certainly didn’t cover specters trying to drag him down through the cobblestones. That was no memory. It felt more like crossing over into another world.

  “Look.” Gwen led him to the center of the lane again. “We have to keep at this if we expect to get anywhere. What did you see when you fell?”

  “Shapes. Darkness. Nothing useful.” Jack wasn’t ready to tell her about the ghosts. He would never find his father if the only person helping him thought he was crazy.

  The freckles sank with disappointment. “That’s all right, being your first time and all. Cobblestones are rubbish for sparking anyway. Cheap rock. All that traffic. Next time we’ll find you some proper stone.”

  “Wait a second.” Her efforts to lower his expectations made Jack defensive. “I did see shadows that looked like people running . . . and a big explosion. I thought I heard an air raid siren, too.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Gwen scrunched up her brow, processing the information. Then she slapped her forehead. “World War Two. Very common for new trackers. The first memory you see in stone will always be the most traumatic—until you learn to focus your sparks, that is. Here in London that’s often a World War Two bombing raid. The stones didn’t like those one bit.”

  “What about the Great Fire? Wouldn’t that qualify as traumatic?”

  “Yes, but what if these stones never saw the fire? I’ll bet they were laid during the reconstruction, right in the ashes of old Pudding Lane.”

  “Ashes?” Jack gazed down at the unusual whiteness of the grout. “What kind of ashes?”

  “All kinds. There was a great, deep field of it after the fire, and the king and his architects rebuilt London right on top of it all. The ashes became the foundation of the new city.”

  “Sure. All kinds.” As he stared down at the disturbing ash-grout, Jack picked up a hint of red—a tiny, triangular rock deep in a crack between the stones. It wasn’t lying on top of the grout like the gum or the cigarettes. It was part of the grout, worked into it from the beginning. Once he isolated the first fragment, others started popping up all around him, floating above the stones in his mind’s eye. The distribution of the pieces formed a half circle in the lane, twenty feet long. “I see something.”

  “I can tell,” said Gwen, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Would you mind telling me what it is?”

  Jack squatted down to pick up the largest piece, barely the size of a dime, but he curled his fingers back as they neared the cobblestone. “Um . . . why don’t you get it? Your fingers are smaller. They’ll fit between the stones.”

  She shrugged and knelt beside him, sticking a delicate pinkie down into the gap and rubbing the fragment. “It’s rough. Like brick. And look how deep it is. I bet this was recently exposed, after the grout above it eroded in the rain.”

  Jack showed her the half-circle pattern and watched her smile widen the whole time. “This is it,” she said, walking the perimeter of the brick fragments. “This is the epicenter.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “My uncle, remember?” Gwen pointed to Jack’s eyes with two fingers. “The tracker observes.” Then she tapped her head. “The quartermaster deduces. Detective teamwork at its finest. Uncle Percy taught me everything there is to know about the art of deduction.”

  “And you deduced from a few slivers of red brick that this is the epicenter?”

  “It’s simple—elementary, you might say—if you take a moment to think about it. The brick is in the grout. The grout comes from the period right after the Great Fire. And at the time of the fire, only one building on Pudding Lane was made of brick.” She cocked her head toward Jack. “And that building was . . . ”

  “The bakery.”

  Gwen punched his arm. “Brilliant! And the bakery is where it all began.”

  “Great. Good work. So where is the Ember?”

  Her smile flattened. “Don’t know. Haven’t gotten that far, I’m afraid.”

  Jack leaned back against the apartment building that stood in the place of the burned bakery. He sighed. “Maybe we
’re going about this all wrong. My dad used to say that where is a wasted question—”

  “If you don’t start with who, first.” Gwen punched him again. “Of course John Buckles said that. It’s an old tracker saying.” She pressed her lips together, looking off into space for several seconds. Finally, she nodded. “And it tells us we should have started with the baker instead of the bakery.”

  Jack was beginning to develop a bruise where she kept hitting him. He frowned, rubbing his arm. “Except the baker’s been gone for three hundred fifty years.”

  “Perhaps.” The freckles rose into another smile. “But I know where to find him.”

  Chapter 21

  APPARENTLY THE BAKER had not gone far. Gwen led Jack less than a hundred yards down Pudding Lane, across Lower Thames Street to an old stone chapel next to the river.

  “So the baker went to church?”

  Gwen glanced over at him, raising an eyebrow as they stopped before an ancient wooden door. “Lots of people go to church after they die, Jack.” An old marquee informed them that the chapel was closed. She ignored it, reaching for the handle.

  “Gwen, we can’t.”

  “Sure we can.” The great iron hinges creaked as she leaned back into her pull, and the door cracked open. She brushed her hands together. “If they wanted to keep us out, they would have locked it.”

  Plaques and commemorations of all shapes and sizes covered the plaster walls of the foyer. A hundred names, dates, and in-memoriams flashed across Jack’s brain. The murmurs of a telephone conversation drifted down from the vicar’s chamber above. Gwen put a finger to her lips and inclined her head toward the pews.

  They crossed a raised stone threshold into a narrow sanctuary, where sunlight streamed through rows of stained glass windows, painting whitewashed columns with color. At the front, gold sculptures and rich purple cloth adorned a tall mahogany altar. All of it was beautiful, but Jack couldn’t take his eyes off the drab, dreadfully disturbing floor.

  Every square inch of floor space in the sanctuary was taken up with grave markers, most so old and worn that the names and dates had faded. Jack’s eyes tracked down the center aisle from the altar to his feet. He gasped and hopped backward over the threshold. Even at the very back, he had been standing on a grave.