The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  “What?” Gwen called out behind him.

  It dawned on Jack that she couldn’t see around him. She hadn’t seen the chimney blocking their path. “Nothing! It’s just . . . going to get a little hairy ahead. That’s all.”

  “As if this isn’t hairy enough!”

  Jack reached the end of his foothold and leaned his head back far enough to see around the bricks. The chimney was barely more than three feet wide. He could make it. Maybe.

  Getting a hand and a subsequent foot to the other side was easier than he imagined—too easy. Once Jack got himself into that spread-eagle position, hanging on to the chimney for dear life, he was stuck. He glanced down at the cobblestones below and the world spun. He laid his head against the cold bricks, closing his eyes.

  “Jack, I’m not sure about this,” said Gwen, reaching the end of the ledge behind him.

  “Neither am I.” He went for it, praying for some sort of handhold in the wall on the other side. There was no wall. Jack’s reaching hand touched nothing but air. He fell.

  “Jack!”

  “I’m okay.” On the other side of the chimney was a sort of alcove, an indention for one of the windows of the Queen’s House. Jack had tumbled into it. As he stood, dusting himself off, he saw that the window hung partially open. The black vapor disappeared through the gap.

  Jack poked his head out from behind the bricks. “Come on, Gwen. I’ve got you.” He pulled her across the chimney and she dropped off the battlements, right into his arms.

  “Oh!” Gwen looked up into his eyes as he set her down. “Um . . .”

  Jack quickly turned away and crawled through the window, hoping the shadows were enough to hide the red in his cheeks. “In here. Come on.”

  “Right.” Gwen’s hands dropped to her sides. “We’ll just carry on, then, shall we?”

  Jack stepped down into an attic with sloped timber beams and a wood floor running the length of the Queen’s House to form a long hall, broken by narrow patches of light shining in through the windows. He heard a light tapping in the darkness. “Hello?”

  Release us.

  Odds and ends were scattered about the space—tall paintings, old toys, ancient furniture covered in white sheets. Jack took a step toward the tapping sound and bumped into a rocking horse. It creaked as it rocked back and forth.

  “Do try not to break anything, will you?” whispered Gwen, appearing beside him. “There are five centuries of royal history up here.” She took his hand as they crept through the room. “What is that sound?”

  “A ghost.”

  “There are no such things as ghosts, Jack.”

  He stopped, gripping her hand a little harder. “Really? Then what’s that?” Ahead, in a wide shadow between the pale patches of light from the windows, stood the black figure. Now, Jack. Release us. It sank into the floor.

  Gwen pulled her hand away. “It’s only a raven, silly.”

  Jack squinted at the spot where the specter had disappeared. She was right. He saw the same large raven they had seen in the tower. How had he not seen it before? The bird pecked at the wood plank beneath its feet, making the tapping sound they heard from the window. As Jack approached, it backed away, head cocking this way and that. Five others fluttered down from the shadows to join it, forming a semicircle around the plank, watching with focused intensity.

  The floor seemed to rise in Jack’s vision, the pattern of the planks becoming more apparent. The central plank, the one the raven had pecked, was different. The gaps around it were wider than the gaps between the others, and the nails holding it down had square heads. All the other nails in the attic were round. Without turning to look at her, Jack held out a hand to Gwen and snapped his fingers. “Give me your screwdriver.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Gwen, please.”

  She complied, and Jack shoved the screwdriver into the floor to pry up the plank. It came up an inch with a terrible squeak. Gwen gasped. He looked back and frowned. “Tell me how this is different from what you did at the top of Barking Tower.”

  Her mouth snapped closed again.

  After two more cranks, the plank came free and Jack carefully set it aside. The hole beneath was deeper than he expected. He couldn’t see what was down there. He winced as he put a hand down into the hole, praying that he would not touch the cold, white silk of bone, or the grit of human ashes. He found neither. Jack’s hand closed around a thick cloth bundle instead.

  Six ravens hopped attentively in Jack’s wake as he carried the bundle to the light. Black vapors hovered around a thick roll of red cloth. Release us.

  He glanced at Gwen. She couldn’t see the vapors. She hadn’t heard the whisper. But her expression told him she recognized the worry on his face. “No ghosts, Jack,” she whispered, nodding at the cloth bundle. “Only answers.”

  The two sat down on the wooden floor, and Jack unfurled the wrappings. One of the items inside clunked to the floor, a large medallion on a gold chain. A sapphire the size of a walnut was set in the center.

  “I told you there were no ghosts.” Gwen picked up the necklace, letting the jeweled medallion twirl back and forth, sparkling in the light.

  “And you were wrong.” Jack held up a second item from the bundle for her to see, a thick sheaf of papers, bound in soft leather. He read the title burned into the cover. “Great Fire of 1666. The Rolls of the Silent Dead.”

  Chapter 43

  CAREFULLY, JACK LEAFED through the yellowed pages. “Names. They’re all names.” He stopped at the center, examining the first few entries on the page.

  Fryght, Anne

  Fuller, Geoffrey

  Matilda (Wife)

  Unknown Daughter (Infant)

  Fynch, Henry

  William (Son)

  Unknown Son

  On it went, column after column, family after family. Some were listed merely as numbers in a tenement, with only a profession listed—mason, smith, fuller, and the like.

  “There are hundreds of pages,” whispered Gwen, clicking on her flashlight, “each with five columns. There must be tens of thousands. The official death count really was an error.”

  “Or a lie.” Jack kept turning the pages. “Why weren’t the bodies ever found?”

  “Cremated. Burned to ash along with everything else. The bigger question is, who collected all these names?” Gwen nodded down at the book. “Check the last page. A seventeenth-century author would have signed at the end of the record, not at the beginning.”

  Jack turned the book over and opened the back cover. Beneath the names on the last page, he found a final, cryptic inscription.

  Compiled by a nameless cobbler and a humble baker. Recorded that the dead might someday be remembered. Kept secret at the behest of our king. May God have mercy on us all.

  He shook his head. “Nameless. Great. Now how are we going to find the cobbler?”

  “And what does this medallion have to do with the list?” Gwen held the jeweled disk in her open palm, letting its gold chain dangle through her fingers. “It can’t be the Ember.”

  “Or can it? Is it hot or anything?” Jack stretched out a hand to feel the sapphire. The moment his fingertips touched the cool, hard stone, his body dropped through the floor.

  Jack had learned enough to know a spark when he felt one. He landed on his feet, standing at the open window of the attic, looking out at a wall of flame engulfing the city. The charred, black scent of burning debris filled his nostrils. He could see every detail, the grit of battlement stones before him, the grain of the smoke rising in the distance. Like the cobblestones on Pudding Lane, the sapphire had taken him deep into the past. But these were no shadows. Jack could see everything as clear and sharp as if he were really there.

  Without any thought or desire to do so, he turned from the window. He was a captive of the sapphire, and it seemed the jewel was hanging around someone’s neck. Two guards in red-and-blue regalia approached, dragging a man between them. They tossed him down ont
o the wood planks and he scrambled to his knees, adjusting a wig of sooty curls as he looked up. Jack recognized his face from the book in the Tracker Collection. He would have breathed out the name in disgust if he could speak. Bloodworth.

  “It was him, sire.” A second man took a knee beside the mayor. Jack knew him instantly. The black grime in the lines of Thomas Farriner’s face made him look unnervingly like the effigy covering his tomb. “My maid witnessed him throwing the cursed thing through my window. She would not leave the house for fear of the malice in his eyes, and she perished because of it. So have many, thanks to this devil’s sorcery.”

  Bloodworth glowered at the baker and opened his mouth to reply, but he was interrupted by a calm, commanding voice, one that seemed to come from Jack himself. “What precisely have you done to us, my Lord Mayor? And how do you propose to stop it?”

  The anger fell from Bloodworth’s face, replaced with sniveling fear. “I ended the plague, Your Majesty. I rid my city of its vermin. But now I cannot stop the flames. I know not how. The jewel from the clock controls them. They are not natural.”

  The mayor reached into his cloak, causing the guards to take a step closer, but what he withdrew was no weapon. He held out a blue-green box with a broad window of glass in the lid. “This was the heart of the clock, Your Majesty. It held the infernal jewel, the . . . ember . . . that made the fire. The box itself has some power to push back the flames. I tried to go back for it, but the heat”—his eyes fell to the floor—“and the churning storm of smoke and sparks. It is worse than any tempest you can imagine. No man can find his way through the conflagration.”

  Farriner suddenly stood, eyes widening. “I know one who can! He is well known in Little Tyburn, Your Majesty, for tracking lost items, even children, with uncanny skill. Give him the Lord Mayor’s box and he can track this Ember through the flames.”

  Both men fell silent for several seconds. Then the commanding voice returned—the voice Jack knew belonged to the king. “Tell me this hunter’s name, Master Farriner, that I may send men to the shelters at Moorfields to find him.”

  “He has no given name, sire. And he is no hunter. He was an orphan who took trade as a cobbler. He used to say that the brass bindings on a good pair of boots were the only thing that shined in Little Tyburn.” The baker shrugged. “Most people call him Johnny Buckles.”

  Chapter 44

  JOHNNY BUCKLES.

  Jack reeled at the sound of his ancestor’s name. The cobbler he had been looking for all day was the first of the Buckles line. The baker, Thomas Farriner, and Jack’s own family were tied together in history. The realization threatened to sever his connection with the sapphire. White light flashed, obscuring the spark. He felt a familiar rising sensation, pulling him out of the past. He wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  Jack pushed, straining his synapses, trying to stay in the seventeenth century. He needed to see more. He wanted to see the cobbler’s face. His head screamed. The light became a sheet of solid white, blocking everything. He was losing.

  The effort to hang on tensed every muscle of the body Jack had left behind. A cry startled him, distant—not his own voice but familiar. He couldn’t focus on it. He had to keep fighting. Then, suddenly the bright light was gone, and so were the mayor and the baker.

  Jack was back in the attic room, but he was still standing. The scent of smoke still hung heavy in the air. A man in a long leather coat, blackened with soot, knelt before him. Strings of grimy brown hair hung down, hiding his downcast face.

  “Well,” said the commanding voice of King Charles, “the fire has fallen. You must have found what I sent you for.”

  The young man’s face lifted, and Jack would have shouted if he could. The cobbler was a younger version of his dad, or maybe an older version of himself. Without a word, Johnny Buckles pulled the Lord Mayor’s blue-green box from his coat and held it up before the king. “Do not open the box, Your Majesty. The jewel feeds on the air and comes alive with fire. It is nigh impossible to reclaim once unleashed.”

  Jack noticed his ancestor’s hands were bandaged. The cuffs of his coat were not merely blackened—they were charred. Retrieving the Ember had come at some cost. A hand beset with rings appeared from the periphery of Jack’s vision, pressing the box away. “Open it? I will not even hold it. This Ember is too dangerous a thing for ambitious hands to carry. I charge you, cobbler, with its safekeeping. Hide the jewel where even you would trouble to find it.”

  The cobbler bowed and turned to go, but the king commanded him to stay.

  “Wait. Service such as yours demands reward.”

  The vision jerked and shook. Jack thought he was loosing his hold again, but he quickly realized the sapphire was on the move. Soon the medallion hung from the cobbler’s neck. Jack looked up at a man he could easily have mistaken for Captain Hook, if he did not already know better, down to the coiled black wig and the curled mustache. Yet the gold trim of the king’s coat was singed, his elbows blackened. Even he had been out among the flames.

  The king nodded to someone out of Jack’s view, a guard perhaps. The interview was drawing to a close. “We will call upon you soon, young . . . Buckles. The Crown has need of a skilled tracker. In the meantime, you will not speak of this Ember, or the Lord Mayor’s part in the fire. With the late civil war and the treasure lost in this calamity, we are greatly weakened. Rumors of a dangerous weapon in our hands and whisperings of a terrible atrocity committed by a knighted lord would embolden enemies both without and within. England would not survive.”

  The cry Jack had heard before encroached on his vision. He lost his hold on the spark, accelerating upward until he reached lightning speed, with the noise growing louder the whole time. Then he was back, sitting in the dark with Gwen, his hand clasped over hers, her lips parted in the midst of a yelp. “Ow! Not so hard. That thing is sharp!”

  Jack felt the pain as well and quickly released her.

  “You’re a tracker,” said Gwen, massaging her hand. “I know you don’t have to squeeze so hard to tell if something’s hot.”

  Jack stared down at the impression the medallion had left on his hand. “I saw it. I saw the real Ember. It was right there, inches away from me.”

  “You sparked.” Gwen nodded. “That explains the grip. But I’m still mad . . . sort of. What did you see?”

  Jack placed the rolls of the dead back on the red cloth and wrapped them up again. “I know why these names were kept secret so long.”

  “To cover up the scandal of mass murder by a landed lord, of course. I put that much together on my own.” Gwen got to her feet and offered him a hand. Then she pulled it back. “Easy does it this time, okay?”

  “I’m not going to spark off your fingers, Gwen.”

  “Right. Okay.” She extended the hand again. “What about the cobbler? Did the spark show you where he took the Ember?”

  “Not exactly, but I saw and heard enough.” Jack let her help him to his feet. Then he took the medallion by its chain and carefully added it to the cloth bundle.

  “Well?” Gwen was still waiting for him to elaborate.

  He walked over to the window, gazing out at the lights of modern London. “The Ember is hidden in the one place I absolutely cannot go.”

  Chapter 45

  “Johnny Buckles could have buried the Ember in the woods south of the Thames,” argued Gwen, folding her legs up onto the seat of the Tube car they were riding in. “Or perhaps a cave in the Scottish Highlands. For all we know, he took it out of the country.”

  “He didn’t. He would have kept it close.” Jack stared at their reflections in the bowed window. It worked like a funhouse mirror, giving them each two heads, one above the other, like the king and queen in a weird deck of cards. “King Charles charged him with keeping the Ember safe. He would have hid it someplace where he could keep an eye on it.”

  The car was empty except for the three children, slowly making its way westward stop by agonizing stop. The Ministry Ex
press would have been faster, but Gwen had insisted it would be too risky. Using Elder Ministry resources had been fine while the Chamber was in lockdown. The other ministries didn’t know one tracker from another. But now that the lockdown was over, the Chamber would be watching the maglev. The last thing the children needed was to let the wardens know they were headed straight for the Ministry of Trackers—that the Section Thirteen was about to sneak into the Keep itself.

  The train slowed and the revolving-door-Tube voice spoke in her obnoxiously calm tone. “This is . . . Great Portland Street. Change here for connections to the . . . Metropolitan . . . and . . . Hammersmith lines. Mind the gap, please.” The doors opened. Jack looked to Gwen to see if they were getting off. She still hadn’t told him exactly where the Keep was.

  The clerk shook her head, letting the doors close. “What do you plan to do about the book of names?” she asked, rocking sideways as the car lurched into motion again.

  “I’m not sure.” Jack had set the book and the medallion back in the hiding place beneath the floorboard, while the ravens looked on with what he felt were disapproving glares. Even if he wanted to release the names, no one would take the word of an American kid. The best he could do to satisfy the specters would be to call the right archeologist with an anonymous tip. “Who am I to let such a big secret out? On the other hand, those ghosts really want their names released.”

  “You didn’t see any ghosts, Jack.”

  “Per’aps ’e did,” interrupted Shaw, whose oversize frame was taking up most of the bench catty-corner to the others. “I’m bettin’ a thirteen ’tracts all sorts of undesirables.”

  Gwen gave the warden a withering scowl. “He saw a raven, Shaw. I saw it too.”

  Jack frowned. “I’m not talking about the Tower. I mean, I am, but . . .” He cast a glance at Shaw. He didn’t want to discuss the rest in front of the warden. Of course, Shaw already knew he could see fields of data and spark before his time. Why not add communing with the dead to his list of Section Thirteen offenses? He sighed. “The ghost in the Tower wasn’t the first one I saw today.”