“What a bright sole you have!” Kolt chuckled. “Those shoes will come in handy if you run into New England witch hunters or the Goliath frogs of Cameroon during mating season.”
Gertie touched one of the stone hands to make sure it was not real.
Down and down they went until reaching an enormous cavern, lit by orange cubes attached to the wall.
“Nice to see the power is back on; otherwise we might have had to run back upstairs for Slug Lamps.”
The cavern was circular, and at least twice the size of the cottage. On all sides were narrow corridors, and down each one, rows and rows of doors as far as Gertie could see.
“What’s behind all those doors?” Gertie asked, hoping Kolt was not going to describe something with more than two eyes, or sharp teeth.
“You’ll find out soon.”
In the middle of the cavern, neatly arranged in stands, Gertie saw bicycles, ice skates, skateboards, a black motorcycle with a yellow headlamp, wooden skis, a golden jacket with wings, spiked shoes attached to rope, and a giant bubble in a sort of orange rubber claw that Kolt said was a personal submarine.
“All lost objects that may have to be returned someday,” Kolt said, “but until then, they help get me around down here—especially when I’m in a hurry.”
“Even those?” Gertie said, pointing to the wooden skis.
“Oh, those marvelous things were made in Norway from hickory trees for an expedition to the North Pole. Luckily for the explorers, there were nineteen other pairs that didn’t go missing. I need them down here for when the ice comes.”
“Ice?”
“Yes, when the sea freezes and it snows inside the cliff.”
Gertie tried to imagine the cave under a blanket of white powder.
Just then a small yellow light appeared far away in the darkness and came toward them quickly.
“Finally!” Kolt said with relief. “Ever seen a cave sprite, Gertie?”
“What’s that?”
“They live down here in a hive and help me find my way about.”
When the cave sprite got close, Gertie could see it was a ball of light about the size of an apple. It hovered there, as if waiting for instructions.
“Can they speak?”
“No, but they understand perfectly well, and communicate directly with the B.D.B.U.”
“What’s that? You mentioned it before?”
Kolt ignored Gertie’s question and cleared his throat to address the cave sprite. “There seems to be something down here that’s making tapping noises!”
The glowing ball didn’t move. Kolt winked at Gertie, “There are seven cave sprites in total, Gertie, the souls of great warriors I believe, from a Japanese samurai to the fierce queen of Ndongo. But it’s difficult to know who is who, so I named them after the days of the week. This one’s a bit deaf, so I’m guessing it’s Sunday, the eldest.”
“SOMETHING IS LOOSE, SUNDAY!” Kolt bellowed. “CAN YOU FIND IT FOR US?”
The little ball of light shivered, then zipped off.
“Stay close!” Kolt said as they hurried after it.
After racing down several corridors with numbered doors on either side, they came to a rope bridge.
Kolt warned Gertie to cross very slowly and not look down.
“Why is there a rope bridge down here?”
“The floor collapsed in this part of the cliff about two hundred years ago, according to the records—must have been an ancient air pocket. It happens from time to time.”
They were halfway across when Gertie’s legs started trembling uncontrollably. “Er, how far is it to the bottom?”
“About a day,” Kolt said. “Two at most.”
Her palms went sticky on the rope. “Just . . . put . . . one . . . foot . . . in . . . front . . . of . . . the . . . other,” she reassured herself.
But then the bridge began to swing, and panic flapped its wings inside her.
“What’s that? The bridge! We’re going to fall!”
“Just a slight breeze!” Kolt said. “We must be approaching the midpoint.”
“Just . . . one . . . foot . . .” Gertie said, trying to control her breathing and move her hands along the rope in concert with her feet.
Finally they made it across. Gertie felt like kissing the ground, but the cave sprite was doing slow circles around her head.
“I think Sunday has forgotten where we’re going,” Kolt explained, “but that’s old age for you.” He turned to the elderly sprite. “SOMETHING IS MAKING NOISE DOWN HERE, SUNDAY, YOU WERE TAKING US TO THE PLACE!”
The glowing ball bounced energetically, and the chase resumed down another steeply descending corridor with Kolt and Gertie close behind.
“How many rooms are there down here?”
“945 bedrooms. Now keep moving.”
“945? Bedrooms? What’s in them all?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow,” Kolt said, wheezing for breath, “when we’re not dealing with noisemakers.”
“Does all this have something to do with that key? With being a Keeper of Lost Things?”
“Yes, of course—LOOK OUT! GERTIE, GET DOWN!”
9
The Admiral and a Jewel Thief
GERTIE DUCKED QUICKLY, as something whistled over her head and hit an old, hollow water tank with an ear-shattering clang.
Then another object hurtled through the air and knocked Kolt’s bowler hat off.
“What was that? Are we under attack?”
“Tennis balls, Gertie!” Kolt cried, shielding his face.
“What?”
“Yellow balls used in a game that’s popular with people on Earth who have too much leisure time. Let’s try to get closer.”
As they crept on all fours, keeping low to avoid the tennis balls, the clanking became louder than ever.
“What’s that thing the balls are hitting?”
“It’s an old water tank that fills up if the sea level rises and tries to flood any of the rooms.”
Gertie suddenly glimpsed something.
“Look! Is that an arm?”
“Where?” Kolt said. Gertie pointed to where an elbow was visible in the glow from a wall lamp. “Oh yes, I see it too. Yes, it’s an arm, and it appears to be holding a tennis racket.”
Gertie couldn’t believe there was somebody living in the cliff under Kolt’s cottage. Then a gruesome thought crossed her mind. What if this was some kind of prison? A colony of bedrooms carved into a cliff under a cottage? What if Kolt were some sort of warden? Was that what it meant to be a Keeper? She shuddered thinking about what or who else might be lurking behind the hundreds of numbered doors they had already passed.
“I’ve got to hit the hand,” Kolt said, “so that it drops the racket.”
Kolt picked up a tennis ball and tossed it at the arm, missing by a few feet.
“Why not ask nicely for the person to stop hitting balls at us?”
But before Kolt could answer, the arm moved out of the shadows, and Gertie could see that it wasn’t attached to a body. It was simply a human arm holding a tennis racket that ended cleanly where it should have been connected to something.
Gertie screamed so loudly when she saw this that the arm dropped the racket in surprise. Kolt rushed forward, scooped up the racket, and used it to smack the arm back into the room it had escaped from. Then he threw in the racket after the arm. But before he could shut the door, a human hand adorned with diamond rings came flying out, wielding some kind of metal tool like a tiny sword. Kolt yanked the tool from the bejeweled fingers, threw it to Gertie, and booted the hand back into the room. Without a moment to lose, he slammed and locked the door with a key that was identical to Gertie’s.
“Brilliant, Gertie! You were marvelous—great catch. I really have to hand it to you, ha!”
“That’s a lock-pick,” Kolt said, taking it from her and putting it under his bowler hat. “A tool of thieves, in case you were wondering.”
But Gertie didn’t care what it was. “Why are there body parts playing tennis under your house?”
“Oh, that’s easy to explain,” Kolt said as a new cave sprite appeared to guide them back. “The arm belonged to Admiral Barbarossa, and was fashioned from pure silver sometime in the sixteenth century. Quite ingenious, but as he only ever used it for sword-fighting in the desert, it’s probably good it went missing.”
“But the hand with the jeweled rings—was that also fake?”
“Flesh and bone as far as I can tell. It probably belonged to a famous jewel thief who lost it in the act of picking a lock, so that the hand and metal pick ended up here on Skuldark.”
“Chopped off?”
“Most likely, but thanks to you, Gertie, we now have the lock-pick, while the naughty hand and the admiral’s arm are back where they belong in limb storage. The real mystery is where the sports equipment came from—I hope there’s not another hole between rooms.”
Guided now by Monday—a young cave sprite who Kolt said was still learning its way around, they made their way back through the passageways and across the terrifying rope bridge. Gertie kept her anxiety at bay by firing question after question at Kolt.
“Everything that’s ever been lost from the world,” he told her, “is here on Skuldark—the Island of Lost Things.”
“And we’re Keepers of Lost Things?”
“More than that, Gertie—we return them to the world. Each bedroom below the house contains a different type of lost object. Bedroom 254 just happens to be full of lost limbs,” Kolt said. “It’s been filling steadily as people lose their bits in wars, accidents, and general grossness.”
“But shouldn’t you try to return Admiral Barbarossa’s arm? Doesn’t he need it?”
“Not until the B.D.B.U. orders its return. Keepers can’t just return lost objects whenever they feel like it,” Kolt said.
“So the hands and arms just stay locked in the room?”
“That’s right. And although I am utterly repulsed by the idea of legs hopping around in the darkness, and hands continually clapping for no reason, if the B.D.B.U. orders their return, then return them we must.”
“What’s the B.D.B.U.? Gertie asked. “You keep saying it, but I have no idea what it is.”
“It’s basically a giant book,” Kolt said, then quickly changed the subject. “The last time I went down to bedroom 254, just out of morbid curiosity, I opened the door just a crack to peek inside, and was immediately slapped in the face by a pair of hands, and then kicked in the stomach by a large slippered foot before I could get the door closed again.”
But Gertie felt she had to know more. “The B.D.B.U. is a book? You said last night that it told you I was on the island?”
“The B.D.B.U., my dear, is the brain of this Keeper operation. Think of it as a book containing not just knowledge of the world, but an experience of it—how life feels. The B.D.B.U. decides which lost items are important enough to return to help humans.”
“Help them how? Become more powerful?”
“Less afraid, Gertie. Which makes them kinder, and as a result more advanced as a species, and more able to live in harmony with one another and with nature.”
“So Keepers are trying to help people?” Gertie asked with some relief—though there was still so much she didn’t understand.
“Yes! By returning objects that enable people to broad-en their understanding and experience of the universe and one another.” Then he leaned in and whispered. “So they might eventually discover the grand truth,” Kolt said, straightening up and adjusting his bowler hat.
“A grand truth?”
“That death is not to be feared,” he exclaimed, “but a natural—even beautiful—part of nature’s cycle.”
“It is?” Gertie said, remembering how she felt on the rocky beach that morning with the waves crashing in. “But I think death is the scariest thing.”
Kolt stopped walking. “Being killed is scary, and not knowing where the people we love go when their bodies die is horrible, but death itself is just change. You can’t see the sun at night, but you know it’s not dead. It’s lighting up the lives of others in another part of the same universe. When people learn to value death, they’ll value life and there won’t be all this squabbling for power.”
“Where is the B.D.B.U.?”
“It lives in a tower on the eastern side of the cottage. I’ll take you there tomorrow—but try to stay open-minded in case it’s in a bad mood.”
“It has moods? Can I talk to it? Is it magic?”
Kolt laughed. “‘Magic’ is just a word for things people don’t understand, or are afraid of.”
Monday the cave sprite came to a stop, and Gertie found they were back in the main part of the cavern with all the different vehicles, from wooden skis to kayaks.
“Thank you, Monday,” Kolt said to the sprite. “Please let all the other sprites back at the hive know how well you guided us home from bedroom 254, and . . .” he said, looking at Gertie, “that we have a new Keeper.”
Monday zoomed off excitedly.
“Is every room down here so horrible, Kolt?”
“Goodness no—though bedroom 634 is a little strange. It contains the voice boxes of all the people and animals who have suffered the misfortune of losing their voices. Thankfully, it’s soundproofed with dry seaweed.”
About ninety-seven bedrooms, Kolt explained, had nasty, horrible, worse-than-deadly things. Most of those rooms were reachable only by whitewater tunnels, a miniature railroad, Inuit canoe, rope swing, and—in the case of bedrooms 940 to 945, located in the lowest part of the cliff—a rickety wooden elevator to sea level, where a Victorian diving suit and helmet awaited any Keeper unlucky enough to be sent down there by the B.D.B.U.
“So how do we know when the B.D.B.U. wants something returned?” Gertie asked as they trudged up the steps to the cottage, worn out from the adventure.
“Oh, you’ll find that out very soon, Gertie, and it could be anything from a supercomputer to an old hairbrush that needs to go back. But you should try to sleep now. I have a feeling we’ll be called into action very soon.”
10
The Garden of Lost Things
THE NEXT MORNING Gertie stared for a long time through the window beside her bed, trying to remember more than she actually could. She watched the circling birds, white specks against the hard shell of blue sky. The distant sea was calm, with low humps rolling silently toward the island where Gertie found herself trapped.
So she was a Keeper of Lost Things.
She got out of bed and stared at her old gown and cloth shoes, still on the floor where she had left them. They were both so dirty she couldn’t imagine having to put them on again, but decided that she would wash and keep them in one of the drawers under her bed, as they offered the only physical clues to her previous life.
When Gertie went barefoot up the spiral staircase to the other part of her bedroom, there was a velvet sleeping couch pushed against a back wall of windows where she could peer out over the endless sea.
The silence made her feel peaceful, and she looked around at all the things, wondering if they might one day feel like hers. She also felt safe in this part of the cottage, with several doors, and even the trapdoor protecting her from the things that lived below.
But what about the millipedes, whose eyes they had seen glowing at the edge of Fern Valley? And the people Kolt had told Gertie about—the Losers? There were so many things she did not understand.
With hunger clawing at her insides, Gertie went down t
he spiral staircase and dressed in front of the mirror, staring at the crimson birthmark covering one side of her face.
The nautical lamps along the hallway were still glowing, and Gertie tiptoed past Kolt’s door to the kitchen.
Everything was very still. Kolt’s bowler hat was back on the shelf near the bookcases, and Gertie saw with relief that the trapdoor to the basement was down and the rug had been spread over it. If going down there was part of Keeper life, then she felt that being whisked off home as soon as humanly possible would be the best thing in the world.
For a second, she had the idea to go outside and throw her key off the cliff. If she lost or destroyed it, perhaps she would no longer be a Keeper and, like the other visitors, just disappear back to where she had come from? But then what would happen to the ordinary lives of humans? Would they suffer because of her? She felt pulled in opposite directions, caught between what she wanted and what she knew was the right thing to do.
Light streamed in through the window, and Gertie decided to venture outside and explore while she was alone and had some time to think.
« • • • »
Once in the crisp, bright sunshine, Gertie took a long, deep breath. It felt good to drink down the morning air. She looked to see if there was any sign of her Slug Lamp, but decided it was probably sleeping under the thick moonberry bush.
Purple moonflowers grew up and over the entire front of the cottage, so that from a distance you couldn’t really tell it was a house at all. Kolt was right, she would never have found this place on her own, and Gertie wondered where she might be if Kolt hadn’t discovered her huddled in that hollow at the edge of the woods. She felt grateful to him, but accepting this new life as a Keeper felt like she was turning her back on her old self and the people she imagined were missing her.
The shadowy stacks Gertie had passed on her way through the garden the night before had been restored by morning into real things, piled high, and spread throughout the entire garden, making it a sort of junkyard for all the lost things Kolt had told her about.
Gertie Milk and the Keeper of Lost Things Page 4