There were towers of wooden rowing boats, yellowing surfboards, pianos, a tangled knot of bicycles, circus animal cages (still with straw inside), cars, motorcycles, two-person rocket ships—and in the far distance, rusty camouflage airplanes.
It surprised Gertie that she knew so many names for things. The airplanes interested her most. She wanted to get up on the wing and climb inside to where there was a seat and controls. But it would have been impossible to find her way through the maze of narrow alleyways without accidentally nudging something so that the entire garden came crashing down like dominoes.
At the top of the cottage were two brick squares that Gertie recognized as chimneys, and at the opposite end from her bedroom, she spotted the lighthouse that Kolt had told her about. It appeared to have once been quite high, but something must have smashed the upper part, and inside the ruin left behind, green plants had grown tall and birds nested.
Gertie followed a wide path to the garden gate. It opened with a creak, and she noticed, engraved in the wood, the same letters as on her key, K.O.L.T. The path wound back around into the garden, to where enormous fishing nets hung from trees. When Gertie brushed against one, her denim overall strap stuck, so that she had to pull with all her strength to get free.
Following the main path to another part of the garden, Gertie counted fifteen carriages, the sort that long ago used to bounce along with people inside wearing the most absurd puffy lace clothing, and so many jewels that it took a team of five horses pulling like mad to go even a single inch. The fact that Gertie knew this surprised her. It was another clue, and something she should write down, along with peaches and pineapple.
Growing near the ruined lighthouse, an oak tree with bulging limbs had been hung with hundreds of scarves, which swayed in the breeze as though trying to tie themselves together.
Beneath the canopy of branches, a long table was laid out with gold knives, gold forks, spoons, bone china cups, plates, and side dishes. Gertie especially liked the plates decorated with matching unicorns, as they reminded her of the brass knocker on her bedroom door. From pooling rainwater in the soup bowls, she guessed the magnificent table had been awaiting guests a long time.
“There you are!” Kolt said, when he saw her standing over the royal banquet that (he explained later) had been missing since the year 1624. He was wearing a green velvet suit and the old, worn-out black shoes he always seemed to have on.
“You don’t think I look too much like a frog in this do you?” He said. “I found it in the Sock Drawer and just love the fabric.”
“It’s nice,” Gertie said. “If you don’t mind a lot of green.”
Kolt adjusted a sleeve. “See anything you like out here among all this stuff?”
“The airplanes.” Gertie said. “The sight of them makes me feel happy for some reason.”
“So you remember what airplanes are!”
Gertie nodded. “I seem to remember many names of objects, but not whether I’ve ever used them.”
“We’ve all been through it,” Kolt admitted. “I used to try to remember my parents’ faces, but I’m afraid they’re more real now in my imagination than they ever could be in the real world.”
The thought of never finding out who she was made Gertie want to scream with frustration. How could he give up on his family so easily? She opened her mouth, determined to tell Kolt that unlike him, she was going to get away from Skuldark.
“But now that I’ve got you, maybe things won’t feel so lonely from now on,” he suddenly admitted.
Gertie swallowed the angry words, realizing how hard it must have been for Kolt to be alone before she arrived. Perhaps if she helped him return all these things, they could both go home?
“Were you always by yourself?” Gertie asked. “Or was someone here when you arrived? Who taught you to become a Keeper?”
“A kind, fierce woman in a large black dress named Mrs. Pumble.” Kolt smiled. “She liked to wear feathers in her hair, which I must say really suited her.”
“And where is Mrs. Pumble now?” Gertie asked, imagining for a terrible, quick moment that she was locked up in one of the rooms downstairs. But Kolt seemed too nice to do such a thing—unless there were Keeper rules he had to obey . . . and Mrs. Pumble had broken one of those rules. “Did she find her way home?”
“Actually, yes, Gertie, she did—but when she was much younger.”
“What?!” Gertie was in shock. “So then it’s possible?”
“It is possible, but unlikely.”
“I thought you said it was impossible!”
“I probably said that,” Kolt admitted. “But Mrs. Pumble found her way back and stayed for two months, then returned to Skuldark.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have to read the book she wrote about it, Gertie. It’s lying around somewhere, Mrs. Pumble’s Journey Home.”
“I want to read it!”
“You should, because it goes into great detail about her experience, which happened long before I appeared on the island as a shivering wreck at the base of Ravens’ Peak—though it doesn’t say how she found the way.”
“Why did she come back here?”
“It’s in the book, Gertie. She even drew pictures.”
“So she found a way to leave Skuldark and go home, but then decided to come back, only to disappear years later?”
“That’s right. She just vanished one day, after decades of us living together in the cottage.”
“So will you disappear?” Gertie asked, suddenly afraid. There was no way she wanted to be alone on Skuldark.
Kolt fixed Gertie with a hard stare.
“I’m going to be completely honest and tell you that one day, probably many years from now, I may indeed disappear, and you’ll be on your own, just like I’ve been—unless more Keepers arrive.”
“I don’t want you to die!”
Kolt laughed. “It’s not like that. . . . And remember, what most humans think of as death,” Kolt reminded her, “is completely wrong. The sun lights up the room for a few beautiful moments . . . then travels on.”
Kolt reached over to the table and picked up a bone china teacup with a gold rim. “Remember, the human body isn’t the start of life, it simply holds it for a moment, the way you can fill a cup with water from a slow, deep river. Even if you empty the cup, the river flows on, and the water becomes rain, or snow, or mist. . . .”
Gertie tried to make sense of what Kolt was saying. “So if more people understood this, there wouldn’t be so many wars and battles and struggles for power?”
“You understand perfectly, my dear Gertie.”
But even though she understood it, Gertie still felt dread at the thought of Kolt disappearing.
“You must miss Mrs. Pumble.”
“I think of her every day. Every single day. But enough of this seriousness, Gertie. Let me show you the kites. That will cheer us up.”
« • • • »
Streaming in the distance high above the cottage were hundreds of colorful kites, snapping in the stiff breeze, their strings all tied to the same giant stone hand of an enormous, angry-looking statue half-stuck in the ground.
“Don’t worry about him!” Kolt said, poking its stone eye with his finger. “He’s been here as long as I have and never so much as blinked an eyelid. I assume you missed the swords, lances, spears, and deadly blowpipes on your little garden adventure this morning? You must have missed those or you wouldn’t be here talking to me, ha ha!”
“I don’t remember seeing any weapons. . . .” Gertie said.
“The Russian rocket ships? Umbrellas? Shrunken heads? Telephone booths?”
“Well, I might have seen a . . .”
“Shrunken head?” Kolt interrupted. “Dear child, please tell me you didn’t bring it with you.”
“No, but I thin
k I saw a rocket, if that’s what the tall metal things are with round windows, and I saw the giant fishing nets that are strung up everywhere.”
“Those aren’t fishing nets!” Kolt cried. “They’re giant killer spider webs from the Amazon!”
“Oh,” Gertie said, pulling a thread of killer spider web from her pant leg. “That must be why my overalls kept sticking to them.”
“Yes, they really are awful things. I’m glad the B.D.B.U. hasn’t asked me to return any of them. How they came to be lost I can’t even imagine.
“To be honest,” Kolt said, “it’s been something of a disaster since the Age of Disappearance began, about the time I appeared on Skuldark. There used to be far more of us, a dozen or so Keepers in the old days—not only living here in the cottage, but across Fern Valley where the ruins are. You’re the first Keeper to appear on the island in over a hundred years. Apart from me of course.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. They just stopped coming, hence the Age of Disappearance.”
“Or they didn’t want to come.” Gertie said, wishing she had been given the choice.
“I don’t know why, but with so few Keepers left to return things, the B.D.B.U. has gone bonkers by collecting more objects than I could ever hope to return by myself, filling the rooms below—and now the garden. I don’t think it knows what it’s doing anymore. Not long before you arrived, a collection of French war cannons appeared in my vegetable patch!”
“Cannons?” Gertie cried. “That shoot giant balls?”
“Let’s write that down,” Kolt said, “it’s another clue. Anyway, the cannons minced the strawberries and smashed all but three of the cauliflowers to crumbly bits.”
Kolt went on to describe how the cannonballs had appeared in the kitchen, which was most inconvenient as getting bread to the fire on the toasting fork now required stepping madly from ball to ball in a sort of wild dance, with the added danger of losing (and possibly toasting) an eye.
Fortunately, soon after, the B.D.B.U. announced that the cannons and the dimpled cannonballs were to be returned to nineteenth-century France right away so that Napoleon Bonaparte could get on with whatever nasty business he was up to.
Kolt explained that there was no telling when the B.D.B.U. would decide an object needed to be returned— except that it was always the right moment to keep things moving in the best possible direction for humans. It was a Keeper’s job to be dutiful, and not to try and get out of it. Particularly urgent cases required Keepers to begin the process of return immediately.
“C’mon!” Kolt said, taking off suddenly in one direction. “Let me show you the war birds you liked so much.”
As Gertie caught up under the stone archway of a half-lion, half-woman statue, Kolt was still lamenting the abundance of lost things. “. . . I am so ashamed of how things have piled up. But it’s been just me for so long now.” He stopped and looked around. “What a disaster! Not to mention, Gertie, the rare perennials I’ve lost under all this stuff!”
“Maybe I could help return things until finding a way back home?”
“That’s very kind, Gertie. But even with the assistance of another Keeper, there’s just so much. The B.D.B.U. has me returning five or six times as many objects as when Mrs. Pumble was here—ah, but here are the war birds!”
Gertie sprang ahead with excitement, knocking on the hollow metal wing of a World War II fighter plane.
“Well, get inside if you want,” Kolt told her. “Anything that’s lost is ours to enjoy until it has to be returned.
“The fact is . . .” Kolt went on, clambering onto the wing of a 1943 Spitfire while Gertie climbed into the cockpit, “even with hundreds of bedrooms that go down and down into the cliff and under the sea, our cottage is running out of space, which explains why holes are appearing between the rooms, and things like tennis rackets are getting into the wrong hands, literally!”
Kolt sat up on the wing, making the aircraft bank slightly to one side. “Don’t you agree, Gertie?”
But before she could answer, his weight shifted again, and the old fighter plane banked hard. Gertie instinctively grabbed the control ring, accidentally pulling down on the pneumatic twin-gun firing button, which sent several antique bullets crackling through the sky toward the vegetable garden, where each bullet scored a direct hit with Kolt’s three remaining cauliflowers.
Gertie sat there with her hands shaking.
“Well,” Kolt said, climbing out of a bush and brushing leaves from his green velvet trousers, “there’ll be no vegetables until next season—but at least we can say you’re an excellent shot.”
“You’re not mad?” Gertie said, scrambling down from the cockpit.
“Mad? Not really,” he admitted, pointing at his stomach. “Cauliflowers have always made me a bit gassy.”
« • • • »
“I do want to help,” Gertie said, as they strolled back to the cottage, “but I’m afraid I don’t know the first thing about how to be a Keeper.”
In the sky above, heavy gray clouds were moving quickly toward them from the north, with rumbling and flashes over the darkening landscape. A close crash of thunder made Gertie jump.
“Funny you should say that, Gertie.”
“Why?” she asked, wondering if it had anything to do with the almighty storm that was about to break. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the B.D.B.U. We’re being summoned for an immediate return!”
11
Gertie Meets the B.D.B.U.
ONCE SAFELY IN THE HOUSE, they hurried through the kitchen toward the fireplace. Rain was battering the windows.
“You’ve only just arrived! That old book can’t possibly think you’re ready to start returning things.”
“You mean, to the world?” Gertie said. “But I can try.”
“No no no! What if you get snatched? You haven’t even seen the Time Cat, let alone learned how to operate it.”
“Then where are you taking me?”
“To meet the B.D.B.U.!”
When they got to the fireplace, Kolt reached for a leather book on the mantelpiece titled A History of Chickens. He pulled it out from the shelf, and the wall beside the fireplace slid open to reveal a secret passage.
Kolt smiled, “That was my idea! To hide the entrance using a book no normal person would ever be interested in.”
“But why does the secret door have to be hidden?”
“The Losers, of course! They’ve never managed to break into the cottage, but one can never be too safe, especially with Vispoth.”
“What’s that?”
“Vispoth? The Loser’s totally insane supercomputer—it’s the B.D.B.U.’s nemesis.”
Kolt led Gertie through to a circular stone staircase that went up and up, to the very top of the tower.
“Vispoth is a funny name.”
“It does sound evil, doesn’t it? Like some kind of snake god.”
“Is it big?”
“Vispoth is enormous—the size of a small house in fact, with buzzing and flashing lights all over it.”
“Wow.”
“It’s the brain of the Losers—and it’s capable of calculations that would take a human being thousands of years to work out with a pencil and paper.”
Gertie could feel herself getting dizzy. From the outside, the ruined lighthouse rose only a little higher than the chimney. Gertie couldn’t understand why there were so many steps.
“What you saw from the outside is the ruined lighthouse,” Kolt explained, “which is what you’re meant to see—the real tower is inside it, invisible of course.” Kolt’s words echoed through the stone chamber. “It goes up almost to the clouds, and is completely covered with Narcissus paint, which reflects its surroundings perfectly—making the visible suddenly invisible. Don’t ask me where Mrs. Pumble got
the stuff, probably the twenty-fifth century.”
Gertie wondered if the B.D.B.U. could speak, and if she would be allowed to ask a question, such as where she was from, or if her real name was Gertie Milk. She also wanted to know how they were going to return things to the world. Was there a door? Or a giant hole in the ground they could toss things into?
“How did it know I was on the island yesterday?”
“It’s the most concentrated source of knowledge known to mankind, which I’m sure you know includes womankind, animal-kind, plant-kind, bacteria-kind, subatomic-particle-kind, invisible-kind, and of course people and creatures who are not kind at all—nasty-kind.”
“Really?”
“It knows and feels everything, Gertie, there are even pages within the pages. Don’t ask me how, but over the years bits of the book have even reached Earth and are known to humans through books and stories they consider holy or religious. But these are mere fragments—splinters from the tree of ultimate knowing. The B.D.B.U. is very old now, Gertie, and wisdom in age often comes with confusion, and a little madness!”
“I think I understand,” Gertie said. “And when it wants something returned, it changes the weather?”
“That’s right. Sometimes I’ll wake to a light snowfall, which means the task isn’t urgent at all, and after a steaming bowl of hot chocolate I’ll skip up the tower steps to find out the next adventure.”
“But does returning things really help people?” Gertie asked. “Maybe if you hadn’t returned those cannons to Napoleon, the war would have ended.”
Kolt stopped to catch his breath.
“A Keeper’s task is to return things that help humans grow their knowledge. You may not know this, Gertie, but for the first 180,000 years, our species of human lived short, painful lives with lots of hair and no shampoo.”
“But why did they go so long without inventing anything?”
“They were too busy, I suspect, looking for food and being chased all over the place by wild beasts. But then I’m guessing humans discovered that every living thing contains the power to regrow itself.”
Gertie Milk and the Keeper of Lost Things Page 5