The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  Jack closed his eyes. “That’s why I grew up in America.”

  “And that’s why you can’t go to the Ministry of Trackers, not now. If you go to the Keep, they’ll contain you, Jack. They’ll lock you up. You’re far too dangerous.”

  “Wait. What about the Ministry Express? Nobody bothered us in there.”

  “Apples and oranges, Jack. The Elder Ministries sometimes share knowledge in their service to the Crown in defense of the Realm, but for the most part they keep out of one another’s affairs. Section Thirteen is a tracker regulation. The spooks, dragos, and toppers couldn’t care less which John Buckles you are. The same goes for the employees in the common areas, like the Ministry Express stations.”

  “Then why did the dragos stare at me like that?”

  Gwen stood up from the bank and brushed off her coat. “Perhaps they simply don’t like your face,” she said, walking past him. “Your constant look of confusion absolutely screams wally.”

  • • •

  Moments later, Jack was on a ladder, pushing with all his strength to lift one end of an iron grate out of its housing. The grate made a terrible screech as he slid it out of the way.

  “Shhh!” Gwen scowled up from the rungs below. “That’s a church up there. It’s a safe bet the vicar heard that gas explosion. Don’t you think he’ll put two and two together if he catches us climbing out of his sewer? We’ll spend the rest of the day explaining ourselves.”

  “Something you hate to do, right?”

  “Ha-ha. Get on with it.”

  Jack climbed up onto the stone floor at the bottom of a square brick tower and helped Gwen up after him. As he slid the grate back into place, it slipped from his fingers and dropped into its housing with a pronounced clang. He cringed.

  Gwen shook her head. “It’s like you’re not even trying.” She turned to the rickety wooden staircase that wound its way up through the tower and started to climb.

  The bells gradually increased in size, from softball-size chimes at the first level to a single bronze giant at the top. Gwen paused at the beach-ball-size bell level, next to a stained glass window. “Have you ever heard of Great Fire glass?” she asked as she caught her breath.

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t think we have that in Colorado.”

  “No. Probably not.” She gave him her know-it-all grin and nodded at the window. “The Great Fire melted all the glass in five-sixths of London into little green globs. The window makers reformed many of them into decorative panels to commemorate the fire, but most of those were destroyed three centuries later, in the bombings of World War Two.” She gestured to a pair of colored panes at the center of the window. “Only these two remain.”

  Jack had to admit the stained glass panes she showed him were pretty cool—rare pieces of history mounted in a church, rather than being locked up in a museum. He could make out the streaks left by the minerals that colored the glass, and the bubbles and imperfections. He stretched out a hand to feel the texture.

  “Wait. I didn’t mean you should—”

  Chaos. More than chaos. Total bedlam. Jack saw a collage of sights and sounds, all trapped in a two-dimensional plane like the very pane of glass he had touched. Flashes, shadows, horns, murmurs—the same relentless cacophony he experienced that morning, but multiplied a hundredfold and twisted together. The pain threatened to rip his head apart. He tried to pull his hand away, to make it stop, but he couldn’t. Instinctively he pushed instead.

  The two-dimensional plane shattered, falling away in a hundred glistening shards to reveal the awful scene behind. London burned. Pillars of living fire rose fifty, sixty, a hundred feet in the air, roaring like freight trains. Men and women ran back and forth, some carrying litters with groaning bodies, searching for a route of escape, but there were none. A few gave up and stood gazing upward, hypnotized by the flames. They would bake there. Jack knew it because he could feel the heat on his face and chest, growing more intense by the second.

  An orange ball of flame arced through the sky and landed on a brick building not far away, burning through the masonry like it was thatch. Nothing was safe. One of the hypnotized throng turned to look in Jack’s direction, staring at him with an empty, blackened face. He stretched out a hand, looking as if he was about to speak, and then his whole form changed from sooty peasant to shadowed wraith. The specter let out a silent cry and sank into the cobblestones, revealing the incoming fireball behind it. Jack couldn’t run. He couldn’t step out of the way of the incoming missile. He couldn’t even scream.

  “Jack. I said don’t touch it.”

  The fireball was gone, and Jack was staring at the innocuous pane of colored glass again, bubbles, streaks, and all. Gwen had him by the wrist. It was she who had pulled his hand away, not him. He tried to tell her that he had somehow sparked on the glass, but his lips wouldn’t part. No sound came out, not even a grunt.

  The vision was over, but Jack still had no voice.

  Chapter 27

  JACK TRIED AND tried to part his lips, but he couldn’t. All he could do was grunt. He seized Gwen’s wrist and held it tight, eyes wide with panic.

  “Ow. That hurts!” cried the clerk in a harsh whisper. She wrenched her arm free and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Calm down, Jack. You need to breathe and clear your mind.”

  How could she possibly expect him to calm down? He let go of her wrist and glowered, mustering up a growl, which sort of felt like progress.

  “I warned you not to touch it.”

  “You did not!” Caught unaware by the sudden, and rather loud, return of his voice, Jack clapped a hand over his mouth.

  Gwen gently pulled it away again. “Deep breaths. You’re all right now.” She leaned back and folded her arms. “So, what have we learned from this experience?”

  “That you’re still hiding things from me.”

  “There it is.” Gwen threw her hands in the air. “It’s always my fault, isn’t it? You’re just like Mrs. Hudson.” She marched past him, starting up the stairs again. “What we’ve learned is that trackers do not spark off glass—ever.”

  “Yeah? And how was I supposed to know that?” The old wooden steps creaked under Jack’s weight as he followed after her. “I didn’t know I could spark off glass. It’s not even a mineral.” He paused for a step, thinking about what he had said. “Wait . . . is it?”

  “Of course it is. What do they teach you in those American schools?” Gwen glanced over her shoulder. “Glass is made of minerals that have been . . . altered. The silicates are corrupted, melted into an amorphous mess, so it doesn’t record, it reflects. Glass feeds a tracker a reflection of whatever the world is throwing at it, only amplified and confused, jumbled into choas.”

  Gwen fell quiet as they climbed the last two flights, past the largest of the bells. Jack was stymied by her rebuke. Why was she being so hard on him? “It wasn’t random noise,” he began, trying to tell her what he really saw, but she lit into him again before he could finish.

  “Of course it was noise—it was a loud, higgledy-piggledy barrage that muddled your delicate tracker brain. You know, more than one tracker has fallen into a coma sparking off fake gems or obsidian.” The stairs terminated at the base of a ladder, beneath a wooden hatch. As Jack came up next to Gwen, she waggled a finger at him. “Don’t ever try that again.”

  “I saw the fire, Gwen.”

  “You don’t know what you saw.” She pushed up the hatch to reveal a copper dome, green with age. “Now put it behind you and let’s get to work.”

  A stiff breeze blew from west to east across the domed cupola that topped the bell tower, enough that Jack felt the need to pull his cap down over his ears. Balconies opened to the four cardinal directions, offering commanding views of the city, and each one had a line of etched panels attached to its rail. Jack’s brain immediately registered the heading DAY ONE OF THE GREAT FIRE on the southern display. He walked over to inspect it.

  September 1666

 
2nd (Lord’s Day). Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire. . . . I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. . . . By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down . . . that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.

  “Is this Pepys’s diary?”

  Gwen stepped up beside him. “Well, it’s not the Magna Carta. Keep reading. These displays tell the story of the fire and add other eyewitness accounts to the excerpts from Pepys’s diary. Perhaps the extra bits will tell us what Pepys saw but never wrote.”

  Jack returned his attention to the DAY ONE plaque.

  While Pepys slept, neighbors gathered in Pudding Lane to fight the fire that consumed the bakery. According to a local lawyer, Lord Mayor  Bloodworth was on hand but refused the locals’ pleas to involve the city forces. Pish, he said, a woman could put it out.

  “Sounds like the mayor was no help.”

  “Agreed.” Gwen was reading the next column over. “Pepys caught up with Bloodworth later and relayed a royal order to make a firebreak by pulling buildings down. He says the mayor whined ‘like a fainting woman’ that the fire overtook his men faster than they could work. Then the mayor gave up and returned to his apartments, miles away in Covent Garden.”

  “Could that be the betrayal Farriner complained about in his confession?”

  “Perhaps, but it sounds more like ineptitude.” Gwen ran a finger down a note in the margin. “According to this, the Lord Mayor’s initial assessment could even be considered reasonable. Fires in London were common, and Bloodworth had demanded bonfires be maintained in the slums the year before—an effort to smoke out the plague. His fires burned day and night in the worst tinderboxes of the city, and there were only a few minor flare-ups.”

  “Which makes me wonder why this fire, which started in a brick house, was so different.” Jack skipped ahead to Pepys’s own description of the fire, hours after it began.

  So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat. . . . With one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. . . . The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.

  A second eyewitness account followed, a diary entry from a friend of Pepys’s named John Evelyn, who had watched from the southern bank of the river.

  Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle . . . The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children . . . was like a hideous storm.

  Across the cupola Gwen read out loud from the northern balcony’s display. “ ‘Day three: The stones of St. Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream.’ ” She glanced over her shoulder at Jack. “That’s Pepys’s friend Evelyn describing the lead roof of the cathedral running down Ludgate Hill like molten lava. Other eyewitness accounts over here report balls of fire flying over the rooftops. They thought the French were attacking.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “This was Restoration London,” said Gwen with a shrug. “As in the restoration of the monarchy after Cromwell’s failed commonwealth. England had just survived a brutal civil war. The European sharks were circling. Some Londoners even thought the king’s brother, the Duke of York, was a French sympathizer—not a bad theory, considering he would later invade England with a French army.” She turned back to the etchings. “Witnesses claimed they apprehended French arson suspects and handed them over to the chief magistrate—who happened to be the Duke of York—only to have the suspects mysteriously disappear from the country.”

  “Fireballs,” muttered Jack. “That’s what I saw in the glass. But no one was throwing them. They were . . . unnatural.”

  “Jack, what you saw was—”

  He sighed. “Muddled. I get it. But I know what I saw—solid stone exploding, fireballs burning through brick, massive pillars of flame. Nothing about that fire was manmade. Some kind of force was . . . feeding it.”

  The clerk met his eyes, and he could see that she finally believed him. Both of them said what they were thinking at the same time. “The Ember.”

  Gwen leaned her forearms against the green copper rail, gazing out at the city. “If the Ember burned down London all those years ago, what do you suppose the Clockmaker plans to do with it now?”

  Chapter 28

  “WHAT PEPYS SAW . . .” Gwen strode to the western balcony and the entries from the fourth day. “Pepys couldn’t have seen the Ember start the fire. He wasn’t anywhere near the bakery, but he saw something that Farriner wanted us to know about. If it wasn’t the beginning of the fire—”

  “It was the end.” Jack joined her at the rail and read the first panel. Pepys described the moment he climbed Barking Tower, the very tower they were standing in.

  5th (Wednesday) . . . I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw . . . the fire being spread as far as I could see it.

  “This is the last set of panels and the fire isn’t ending,” said Jack, looking up from the etching. From that balcony, he could see the gold flame at the top of the Monument, half a mile away. “According to Pepys, the flames were as strong as ever, moving east against the wind to engulf the whole city.”

  “Perhaps.” Gwen examined the next column of text. “But listen to what Evelyn had to say a few hours later. ‘But it pleased God, contrary to all expectation, that on Wednesday, about four or five of the clock in the afternoon, the wind fell; and, as in an instant, the fire decreased.’ ”

  Jack bent down to read the words for himself. As in an instant. And next to the quote from Evelyn, Pepys’s own account suddenly reversed from doomsday to hope.

  Here I met with Mr. Young and Whistler . . . and received good hopes that the fire at our end; is stopped, they and I walked into the town, and find Fanchurch-Streete, Gracious-Streete; and Lombard-Streete all in dust.

  Gwen stepped back from the etchings and scrunched up her brow. “Samuel Pepys climbs this tower on the fourth day and sees the entire city ablaze. The flames are eating up the city, traveling against the wind to reach Barking Tower. Then, a few hours later, Evelyn sees the fire suddenly drop. At the same time, we find Pepys wandering around on the ashes of Lombard Street at the heart of the hot zone. How did a two-mile stretch of unnatural, apocalyptic flame, fireballs, and exploding brimstone suddenly drop into nothing?”

  “Someone contained it.” Jack straightened up from his reading. “Someone got control of the Ember.”

  “And we know who that someone was, don’t we? The cobbler saved us. That’s what Farriner’s confession said. The cobbler has to be the one who reined in the Ember, and Pepys must have seen him do it.” She pointed to the floor. “From this very spot.” Gwen grabbed the copper rail and hopped over, landing gracefully on the narrow ledge on the other side.

  “What are you doing?”

  She let go with one hand and reached into her pocket. “You need to spark, Jack.”

  “Yeah. Well . . . I can do that from this side of the rail.”

  “I’m not talking about the copper. Metal memory is too short, remember? Weeks at best. And this cupola was a post-war addition, anyway.” Her free hand emerged from the pocket holding a substantial screwdriver. “We need to get to the bricks underneath.”

  Feeling the rush of the breeze a little more than before, Jack stepped over the rail one leg at a time. The ledge could not have been more than two feet wide. Dozens of cars and pedestrians passed by six stories below. If only one of them would look up, see the crazy children, and raise the alarm, Gwen would have no choice but to retreat. But no one looked up. Jack pressed himself back against the copper. “I don’t see any screws.”

  “Me neither.” The clerk shoved the flat edge of the screwdriver into a joint between two long copper plates and cranked down, using the screwdriver as a makeshift pry bar. The aged
copper let out an angry squeak. After a number of excruciating cranks she had it up several inches.

  “That’s plenty,” Jack insisted. “I can fit my hand in. You can stop breaking the church now.”

  “Oh. Good.” The clerk stopped her attack and hopped back over the rail, leaving him alone on the ledge. “Being out there was totally freaking me out.”

  The edge of the bent plate was so sharp that Jack figured his hand would remain safely up on the tower, even if the rest of him fell off. Still, he could see no other way to get the information they needed. He took a deep breath and slid his palm into the gap.

  “Wait!”

  Jack yanked his hand back in surprise, wincing as the copper scraped the skin from his knuckles. “What?”

  “I should probably warn you that brick is . . . different. The spark might be a little scary.”

  “I’m already scared, Gwen.” Jack rolled his eyes and slid his hand back in. Then he stopped, his palm a millimeter above the brick. “Um . . . just so we’re clear. What exactly do you mean by ‘scary’?”

  Gwen wrinkled her nose. “Brick is weird. It’s not like other stones. In fact, it’s a conglomerate of stones—a hodgepodge.”

  Jack didn’t like the sound of hodgepodge. It bore too much resemblance to higgledy-piggledy. “You mean like the glass?”

  “No. Not like that. But there are dozens of different minerals in there, and their memories don’t always match up. It might seem a little disjointed. Don’t freak out, that’s all.”

  Jack glared up at her. He was about to sink his brain into who knows what, while kneeling on a two-foot ledge six stories above a busy street, and he had just learned that sparking on the wrong material could take away his capacity for speech or put him in a coma. Don’t freak out. Sure. He cringed and let his skin touch the brick.

  Shapes shifted and jerked through the street below—the shards of a broken vase, hastily put back together and set into motion. Sounds came to him like a hundred recordings, all played backward. He recognized one of them. The wailing was jagged and inconsistent, but it was the same air raid siren he had heard on Pudding Lane.