The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  While the warden listened with poorly feigned disinterest, Jack told Gwen about the wraiths in the cobblestones and the skeletons in the Monument, about the man he saw in the stained glass window and the people he saw in the Map. “I’ve been seeing ghosts all day. They all wanted me to find that book.”

  The clerk remained unconvinced. “In all the literature I’ve read about trackers, I’ve never seen any evidence that they can see or hear ghosts.”

  “But I saw—”

  “Visions, Jack. That’s all. Images in your head.” She glanced up at the map of Tube stations above the windows, eyes shifting from one location to the next. “On Pudding Lane, you touched the ashes from the Great Fire. At the Monument, you picked out bones in the sculpture that time had washed away. At the Tower, you saw a raven and heard the wind whistling through the joints of the secret door.” She dropped her eyes to his. “The ghosts were manifestations of your subconscious, Jack. All of them. Your subconscious recognized the clues and put them together into visions to help the rest of your brain catch up.”

  Jack turned back to his strange, two-headed reflection, trying to decide which would be worse: having the curse of seeing the dead or the curse of a subconscious with a mind of its own. “If none of it was real . . . then how do I know what to do with the names?”

  “But you already do, don’t you?” Gwen placed a hand on his knee. “If your own subconscious gave you the visions, then you’ve already decided. You simply haven’t accepted it yet.”

  “Is this ghost of yours the one tellin’ you we’ll find the Ember in the Keep?” asked Shaw, folding his arms and crumpling up his tweed. “Not that I’m complainin’. The Keep is where you belong”—he leaned forward, bushy eyebrows pushing together—“permanently.”

  “No. That part I figured out on my own.” Jack turned to Gwen and frowned. “But I still don’t know where the Keep is.”

  Gwen chewed her lip, glancing at the doors as the car began to slow. “It’s not too late to turn around, Jack. Shaw is right. If we go in there, you may never come out again. And that won’t do your father any good, will it? How can you be so sure the first John Buckles hid the Ember at ministry headquarters, anyway?”

  “Because that’s what I would have done.”

  The clerk nodded. “Then I guess we’re here.”

  Out the window, Jack saw a familiar mural as the train coasted into a station—a wolfish dog pouncing on a terrified man, while two other men raced to help, one wearing a bowler hat. The revolving-door-Tube voice made her serene announcement. “This is . . . Baker Street.”

  Chapter 46

  “THE KEEP IS underneath the Lost Property Office?” Jack tried to contain his anger as he followed Gwen up the stairwell leading out of the station. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did tell you, Jack. I told you the Lost Property Office was the tip of the Ministry of Trackers iceberg. Remember? It’s not my fault you didn’t take it literally.”

  Jack couldn’t believe she was trying to turn this back on him. “You knew the ministry would hold me prisoner if I learned about my family. You told me I couldn’t go to the Keep. But I had already been inside, hadn’t I—inside the Chamber? And you’re the one who pushed me through the door. What was your plan, Gwen, take me prisoner and get some sort of reward?”

  “Not likely.” Shaw let out one of his swinish snorts, tromping up the steps behind Jack as if to make sure he didn’t turn and run.

  Gwen topped the stairs and headed for the turnstiles. “Mrs. Hudson would have found out you were a thirteen as soon as you filed that paperwork. She would have shut you out, Jack, turned you away without explaining anything.” She paused at the barrier. “You were so close to the truth, but you were minutes from walking out the door without ever learning who you really were.”

  “The truth?” Jack’s voice echoed in the station. “Which truth? That my life would be over as soon as I stepped through the big metal door? Or the truth that you wanted a captive playmate so you could pretend to be a quartermaster?”

  A Tube cop seated on a stool in the corner looked up from his newspaper with concern. Jack lowered his voice to a growl. “What did you think would happen, Gwen? Did you think we’d be some kind of twisted team? That you’d bring mysteries down to whatever dungeon they buried me in and we’d solve them together? How fun for you.”

  The Tube cop went back to his reading. With nothing but the Times between him and the guard, Jack hopped the turnstile and stormed out onto Baker Street.

  Jack marched up the sidewalk toward the Lost Property Office. He didn’t have much of a plan. His DNA would open the door to the Chamber, which he now knew was the first level of the Keep, but an army of Shaws was waiting for him on the other side. Maybe he could get past them. Maybe not. At least Sadie would be there.

  “Wait!”

  Gwen chased after him. Jack could see her without looking back, by the echo of every footfall, by the snap of her scarf—a shadow approaching through the white haze of the cold. She had awakened parts of his senses he could not turn off, and Jack wasn’t sure if he was better or worse off because of it. He knew Gwen had kept things from him throughout the day, but he had never thought she meant to betray him right from the start.

  “Jack, stop.” Gwen came up beside him, breathing heavy. “You can’t go in that way. You won’t get two feet past the door and you know it.”

  He kept going, refusing to look at her, two storefronts from the Lost Property Office.

  “I’m sorry. All right? Is that what you want to hear? I used you, Jack, and I’m sorry. I always wanted to be some thing more, do something more than file paperwork. And then you walked in, all tracker-ish and totally impossible and . . . and . . .”

  “And what?” He stopped, inches short of the windows of the Lost Property Office.

  Gwen shrugged, looking down at the pavement. “Well, it was a lot for a girl to handle, that’s all.” She let out a long breath. “I thought your DNA could get me into the upper-level computers, get me answers about my uncle. And I ignored the consequences for you and your sister.” The clerk fell silent for several heartbeats. When she finally looked up again, her eyes were wet but determined. “Don’t go through that door, Jack. Not if you’re doing it to punish me. I won’t let you give up the chance to save your father.”

  “What am I supposed to do? The Ember is in there. I have to get in somehow.”

  She sniffed, wiping away a tear with her scarf. “How about trying the back door?”

  Minutes later, all three stood on the stoop of an ordinary London row house, half a block up Baker Street from the Lost Property Office. The address read 221B. Jack turned to Gwen with a flat expression. “You do realize your back door is a front door, don’t you?”

  “I’ve ’eard of 221B,” muttered Shaw, taking hold of the knob at its center. “It’s a utility access.” He pushed, grunting with the effort, but the door didn’t budge. “It’s locked.”

  Gwen pulled the warden back by his tweed jacket. “Of course it is. And 221B wasn’t always a utility access. For more than two hundred years this was the main entrance to the Ministry of Trackers—secret, until it wasn’t. Once word leaked out, Londoners came calling day and night, with everything from missing persons cases to ownerless hats. Dr. Doyle was the Minister of Trackers then. That’s when he came up with the idea of the Lost Property Office.”

  “If it’s locked,” asked Jack, “how are we supposed to get inside?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He looked down at Gwen in surprise.

  “I said there was a back door. I didn’t say I knew how to get through it.”

  Jack frowned, considering the door. If it was a utility access, maybe someone had used it recently enough that he could spark on the knob. Maybe he would see evidence of a hidden key or a secret combination. He stretched out a hand, but the door swung inward on its own before his fingers reached the knob. A lantern appeared, then a face next to it, small and
innocent. Jack couldn’t believe his eyes. “Sadie!”

  Chapter 47

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” asked Jack, pulling his sister into a hug. “Where is Mrs. Hudson?”

  Sadie hugged her brother back for a long time before pushing away and answering. “Mrs. Hudson got really busy once all the computers were fixed. She sat me down and told me to stay put. But I got this feeling you were on your way.”

  “A feeling?”

  His sister nodded, placing a small hand over his heart. “I could feel your heart. Just like I can feel Daddy’s. So I came looking for you.”

  “You mean you wandered off.” Jack was not sure whether to laugh or cry. He shot a glance down Baker Street. “Come on. We need to get off the street.”

  Inside 221B they found an ordinary English flat, all wainscoting and wood trim, complete with photos hanging on the walls. The four children huddled around Sadie’s lantern at the base of a set of red-carpeted stairs. Jack took his sister’s hand and squeezed it in both of his. “Can you lead us back the way you came?”

  “She doesn’t have to.” Gwen studied the pictures. “I know the way from here.”

  Shaw let out another snort. “Not likely. You’ve never been ’ere before and you know it.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Gwen came to a photo of a man playing the violin, hanging slightly off-kilter. She straightened it, causing a pronounced click, and the floor began to descend beneath their feet. “But I have read all the schematics.” She winked at Jack. They had been standing on a hidden elevator the whole time.

  They descended a good long while through wood, brick, and stone before the elevator finally jolted to a stop within a cage of iron-grate panels. The overlapping grates to the left slid apart, and their little company filed out into a tunnel hewn from black rock. The rush and pound of falling water echoed down the passage. Beneath the natural sounds, Jack sensed something manmade as well—a constant, pulsating drone. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. “Gwen? What is this place?”

  Before the clerk could answer, Sadie hurried ahead, turning a corner and vanishing from sight, leaving them all in darkness.

  “Not this again,” moaned Jack, and ran after her. He turned the corner and skidded to a stop at the edge of an iron bridge that stretched across an underground river.

  Sadie had stopped at the center. She held her lantern out over the rail. “Look, Jack! Isn’t it amazing?”

  He stepped out into the mist rising over the bridge. A torrent of water poured down from above, turning three massive, gleaming wheels through great half circles of copper. Gwen came up behind him, resting her forearms on the rail. “This is the River Tyburn, a tributary to the Thames that runs beneath Baker Street. Your ancestor chose this place for the Keep because the river would provide a concealed source of power and transportation.”

  An aquatic carriage, like the one that had nearly drowned Jack and Gwen, was suspended on a chain between the bridge and the falls. It had rusted in place halfway across the river, on its way to what Jack assumed must be the departure side of an old Ministry Express station. “Transportation?” he asked, eyeing the steel carriage. “You mean the leaky-tubes-of-death?”

  The conversation was interrupted by a loud creak as Shaw opened an iron box at the near end of the bridge, exposing a pronged switch. “Cool. I’ll wager the power is still connected.”

  Jack walked back along the bridge, shaking his head. “Don’t touch that, Shaw.”

  “I don’t take orders from thirteens, now, do I?” growled the warden, and shoved the switch up into its housing. Creaks and groans echoed from beyond the rock walls. The carriage jerked into motion. Then it stopped again, amid a hideous, ringing grind.

  Sadie covered her ears.

  “Shut it down!” shouted Gwen.

  Shaw hastily reversed the switch and the noises stopped—all but the low, rhythmic groan as the carriage bounced slowly up and down on its chain.

  They all stood and stared. Jack saw particles of red dust lazily rising with the mist. Hairline fractures stood out in his mind, so that he wasn’t sure whether he saw them or could simply hear the cracking as they spread through the chain links. Either way, he knew what was about to happen.

  Jack was already moving when the first link failed. The horizontal car dropped to vertical, swinging on the chain and slamming into the chasm wall. The impact broke the other connection and it plunged into the river. The carriage bobbed, carried by the current, then toppled straight toward the control panel where Shaw was standing.

  “Look out!” Jack pushed Shaw back into the stairwell passage as Gwen yanked him the other way by his collar. The big steel tube smashed through the rail between the two boys, sending up sparks on either side, knocking them down onto their seats.

  Everyone froze.

  With a long, terrible groan, the iron bridge began to fail.

  Chapter 48

  JACK SPRANG UP, following Gwen in the race to the other side, pulling Sadie with him. The failing bridge carried them sideways, bending into the river’s flow, and the iron plates at the end began to tear away from the stone. “Jump!” shouted Jack. All three made a final, desperate leap for the passage, and tumbled into a heap on the stone floor.

  “How cool was that?” Sadie sat atop her brother, holding her lantern high.

  Jack set his sister aside and got up in time to see the remains of the bridge sink beneath the water. The carriage floated off into the darkness with Shaw staring blankly after it, stranded on the other side.

  “Oh, well done,” shouted Gwen. “What do you think will happen when it hits the sewer lines, hmm?”

  “The ministry shouldn’t ’ave left it ’angin’ there, should they?” Shaw gave her a shrug. “Bound to go sometime. Miracle no one was ’urt.”

  Jack screwed up his face. “Right. A miracle. You’re welcome.” He gestured at the remains of the bridge. “You’ve cut off our escape, genius.”

  But Gwen leaned close to his ear. “Don’t worry. There are other ways out of the Keep. Locked doors are easier to manage from the inside. That’s what Uncle Percy always says.” She turned back to Shaw, raising her voice over the pound of the waterfall. “We’ll have to carry on without you. We’ll find the Ember and then meet you at Baker Street Station, quick as we can.”

  “Quick as you can.” Shaw nodded his agreement, but his words sounded more like a warning. He backed away into the darkness.

  Jack stared after him for a few seconds, then turned from the river and followed Gwen and Sadie into the new passage. “How do we know Shaw isn’t running back to Mrs. Hudson right now to sell us out?”

  “We don’t.” Gwen shrugged, looking over her shoulder. “But he’s been dying to bring you in ever since the Clockmaker’s beetle interrupted him this morning. I think he’ll wait a little longer so he can finish the job in person, and perhaps nab the Ember in the process.”

  A dozen reflections of orange flame flickered on the wet floor at the far end of the tunnel, where soft light poured in from an open chamber. “Maybe he won’t get the chance,” said Jack, slowing his pace. “It looks like someone left the lights on for us.”

  Gwen pushed ahead. “Gas lamps. Always burning. No need to worry. Not yet, anyway.”

  If the original entrance to the Ministry of Trackers had been designed to intimidate and impress, the builders had succeeded. A broad path stretched from the mouth of the passage across a monstrous cavern of green pools and dripping stalactites. On the far side, a five-story wall of black granite blocks stood exposed, curving away at the edges, as if a Gothic tower had crashed into the earth, drilling down through the middle of the cavern. Jack read the Latin phrase engraved above the huge double doors. “Populus, Thesaurum, Refero.”

  “People, treasure, answers.” Gwen proudly translated the motto. “We find them.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “Treasure?”

  “Not all treasure is gold and silver, Jack. I should th
ink you had learned that by now.”

  One of the two doors was bronze, and stood partially open. The other was cut from a giant slab of opalescent quartz, polished to a glassy shine. Jack didn’t have to ask the reason for the two materials. One door could tell a tracker exactly who had passed through it in the last few days—maybe weeks if he was skilled. The other, he assumed, had a deeper memory. “Is there someplace where the Buckles family kept their stuff?” he asked, ushering Sadie through the doors. “A storage room, or a locker, or something?”

  “A locker?” Gwen snorted, following Sadie inside. “Right. Something like that.”

  The grand hallway beyond the entry had the feel of abandonment—once a broad thoroughfare for important Londoners in need of the ministry’s services, now a forgotten back alley of the Keep. “Everything’s wood,” breathed Jack, running a hand along the carved molding.

  “That’s for—”

  “The trackers. I get it. The Chamber was the same, and the Tracker Collection. You can’t have your primary employees confusing visions with reality every time they lean against a wall.”

  “Precisely. They might do something crazy, like play chicken with a train.”

  Jack ignored the jibe. His attention was fixed on the dusty odds and ends cluttering the shelves built into the walls—framed medals, swords and spyglasses on brass stands, and old photographs. His brain registered a face he recognized. Jack saw his mother.

  He stepped closer, zeroing in on the picture. Mary Buckles was barely out of her teens, seated in the front row of a small group. “Gwen, who are all these people with my mom?”

  “Your mum?” For all her knowledge about Jack and the ministry, Gwen seemed genuinely surprised. She rushed to his side. “That can’t be right. Where?”

  “Front row. Third from the left. That’s definitely Mom.”

  “I’ve seen this picture before.” Gwen pulled the photo from the shelf, pointing to a man with sandy hair and freckles like hers. “That’s Uncle Percy. And the rest are quartermasters—class of 2000.” She slowly lowered the picture. “And, Jack, the woman seated third from the left is Mary Fowler. She was your father’s first quartermaster.”