The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  “The baker’s name was Thomas Farriner.” Gwen slowly advanced up the aisle, examining each marker as she passed. “Allegedly, he left an oven burning overnight, right next to an open window. The wind picked up and you know the rest. According to the story, Farriner was never punished, but the guilt and shame killed him, and he was buried beneath the center aisle of this church.” She reached the front and shook her head. “I didn’t see any Farriners, but the letters are all worn. See if you fare better.”

  Jack had no intention whatsoever of stepping on a floor made entirely of gravestones, not after the wraiths on Pudding Lane. “I think I’ll stay over here and check out the plaques.”

  “We’re not looking for a plaque. Whether he started the fire or not, Farriner was there at the epicenter. He had to have known something. Perhaps he left us a clue.”

  Jack didn’t move. He would rather deal with the chaos of names and dates from the foyer plaques than venture out onto the big-creepy-floor-of-the-dead.

  “Hey! Do you want to rescue your father or not? I need your tracker senses out here. We’re looking for a grave from 1670, but the oldest with letters I could read was from 1676.”

  1676. All the names and dates pressing in on Jack from the plaques and in-memoriams faded—everything except that one year.

  . . . DONATED BY JOHN HUCKERBY, 1676 . . .

  . . . RAISED IN SEPTEMBER, 1676 . . .

  . . . DEDICATED IN 1676 . . .

  It popped up everywhere. “1676,” he said, repeating it out loud.

  “What?”

  “That year. The same year you saw. It’s all over this room, at the top of donor lists and lists of dedications on almost every plaque. There are only a couple without it.”

  Gwen came back to join him. “You can see all these engravings at once?”

  He glared at her.

  “Right. Tracker. Hello-ooo. Introduced you to the concept.” She held up her hands. “I only meant you’re picking up your new skills rather quickly.” She punched his arm. “Well done, you. Now, exceptions are often the best clues. Show me a plaque where 1676 does not appear.”

  Jack silently indicated a small round plaque, and they both leaned in to read it.

  THIS CHURCH WAS DESIGNED BY

  SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN,

  ROYAL ARCHITECT OF

  THE RECONSTRUCTION.

  WORK BEGAN IN 1671,

  TAKING FIVE YEARS TO COMPLETE.

  “Bad news, then.” Gwen shook her head. “The stories are wrong. The baker’s not here.”

  He stepped back, furrowing his brow. “How did you jump to that conclusion?”

  “Finding a clue is a job only half-done, Jack. You have to think about the clue as well.” She waited for him to connect whatever dots had come to her, but Jack only folded his arms and leaned back against a short, arched door at the edge of the foyer, which he assumed was the entrance to the world’s oldest broom closet.

  Gwen rolled her eyes and tapped the plaque. “Look. The church burned down in 1666. Reconstruction started in 1671. And Farriner died in 1670, one year before the first stones were laid. Jack, the baker couldn’t have been buried beneath the center aisle. There was no aisle.” She let out a little huff. “I should have known. Ministry regulations, volume two, section four, rule twenty: ‘The written words of history rarely tell the whole—’ ”

  The door Jack leaned against gave way with a loud squeak, and he fell backward, grasping wildly at the air in front of him. He bounced down the first few steps of a winding staircase and came to rest on his back.

  Gwen’s face popped into view between his sneakers. “Oh, Jack, you’ve solved it.”

  “Solved what?” he groaned, glowering up at her.

  She jogged down the steps and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t you see? The baker was buried beneath the center aisle. Not in the center aisle, Jack, beneath the aisle”—she gestured at the darkness below—“downstairs in the crypt.”

  Gwen removed a penlight—although she called it a torch—from her coat pocket, and the two descended into a rocky chamber. From the darkness beyond the beam, Jack heard the single ploop of a water droplet falling into a puddle.

  “A bit leaky down here, isn’t it?” asked the clerk. “Probably why they haven’t wired it for lights.” She shined her light along the walls, revealing rows of body-length niches. All were empty, making them look sort of pointless, like empty shelves in a library.

  “The bodies were moved to the big cemetery at Brookwood in the 1800s,” said Gwen, even though Jack had not asked. “Along with thousands of others from the city crypts. Built a whole railway for it. London Necropolis Line. Very macabre.”

  Necropolis. Now he couldn’t stop himself from asking. “They moved all the bodies?”

  Gwen nodded, letting her light drift along the empty niches as they crept deeper into the long chamber. “Londoners feared a plague might leach into the groundwater from the piles of bodies beneath their feet. And they had good reason for their paranoia. The bubonic plague had killed thousands. In fact, it was the Great Fire itself that finally put an end to the disease.”

  “Wait.” Jack stopped, grabbing Gwen’s arm to stop her, too. “That means Farriner’s body isn’t here either, and you knew it all along. What are we doing down here?”

  “We were never looking for Farriner’s body, Jack.” She smiled. Her beam had come to rest on a solitary stone sarcophagus near the back of the chamber. “We’re looking for his grave.”

  Chapter 22

  THE SCULPTURE LYING in repose atop the sarcophagus bore the deathly pallor of a body. Its face, once young and peaceful, was made aged and grotesque by purple mold growing in the lines and crevices. Jack had the feeling that it might sit up and greet them as they approached.

  They split and walked up either side, examining the artwork. “Marble,” said Gwen, running her light along the flowing stone robes. “Much better than cobblestone.”

  Jack bent cautiously over the middle of the effigy, scrutinizing what appeared to be a pastry crust filled with cherries, sculpted to look as if the dead man were holding it on his stomach. “He’s got a pie,” he said flatly.

  “That’s a tart, actually. And what were you expecting, a sword?” Gwen shined the penlight in Jack’s face, making him squint. “The man was a baker, not a knight.” She paused and chewed her lip. “Which begs the question: How does a baker merit a sarcophagus like this?”

  “He was the king’s baker, wasn’t he?”

  “High marks, Jack,” Gwen replied with a smile. “You were paying attention. But the king had a lot of bakers. Why did he buy this one a sculpted casket? This is the kind of work reserved for royalty, and we’re talking about the man who allegedly burned London to the ground.” She sighed. “I don’t see any writing at all. If you want answers, you’re going to have to spark.”

  Jack had suspected as much. He didn’t relish the thought of sparking on a grave, not after the spectral hands and the voices on Pudding Lane. “Are you sure he’s not in there?”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “Uh . . . no reason.” Jack held his hands out, a hair’s breadth above the stone.

  Gwen folded her arms. “Go on, then.”

  He swallowed his fear and lowered his hands just enough to touch the cold, wet marble. It felt slippery, slimy even. But nothing happened. Jack let out a relieved sigh. “Huh. Maybe I lost the power.”

  “Sparking is not a power. It’s brain chemistry. And you haven’t lost it. You simply don’t know how to control it yet.”

  “Whatever. It’s not working.” As he spoke, Jack let his palms rest fully on the stone. The clerk vanished in a puff of black vapor. With a disorienting, sideways rush, the room shifted from deep darkness to shades of gray. The shift gave him vertigo, yet, at the same time, he couldn’t fall over if he tried. Jack’s body no longer belonged to him. He had sparked after all.

  Gwen was right. Marble was better than cobblestone. Jack could see the whol
e room, even make out the nose and the lips on the baker’s effigy. But the niches on the walls were still empty. If the spark had taken him back into the crypt’s past, it had not taken him far enough. He sensed a presence standing near him. Jack was not alone.

  A dark figure materialized near the foot of the sarcophagus, the silhouette of a man in a long coat and bowler hat. Dad? Jack’s voice would not come. Still, the silhouette began to move toward him as soon as he had the thought, shadowy hands sliding over the surface of the sculpture. Had it heard him? Jack moved as well, though he had not commanded his body to do any such thing. He shifted sideways into the silhouette, and the two merged into one.

  Jack dropped through the rocky floor and landed right back where he’d started, standing in the crypt with his hands laid on the marble effigy. New silhouettes filled the chamber, a dozen shadows in bulky clothes. There were coffins now too, filling the niches on the walls.

  The silhouettes gathered around him, faceless heads bowed in prayer, and the one at the front spread its hands, uttering groans and murmurs that Jack could not understand. After a long time, almost longer than Jack could bear, the murmurs stopped and the shadows drifted away. Finally, only the one at the head of the sarcophagus remained—the murmuring silhouette that Jack had decided must be the priest.

  The shadow-priest lowered its arms and released another round of groans. Then it did something truly odd. It withdrew a slender object from its dark robes and stuffed it into the effigy’s mouth. The moment Jack thought about reaching for it, he felt an upward rush, leaving the shadow-priest and his clue below. “No! Wait!”

  “Hey!” hissed Gwen. “Keep your voice down.”

  Jack yanked his hands from the effigy and patted his chest and sides, relieved to have full control of his limbs again. “I’m . . . I’m back.”

  “I’ll take that to mean you sparked.” Gwen’s freckles flattened. “And you’re not ‘back,’ because you didn’t go anywhere. Sparks are visions, Jack, not journeys.”

  He nodded but said nothing. His brain was still catching up to the present.

  She rolled her eyes. “Soooo, what did you see?”

  “Oh . . . um . . . he stuffed something in the effigy’s mouth.”

  “He? He who?”

  “The priest.” Regaining his temporal bearings, Jack took the light from Gwen and moved to the head of the sarcophagus. “Right here. I saw—” He stopped. The baker’s lips were closed, not open. They looked as if they had been sculpted that way. Jack shook his head. “That can’t be right. I saw him put an object in the effigy’s mouth.”

  “Are you certain that’s what you saw?”

  He stared down at the baker’s face. “Absolutely.”

  Without any further argument, Gwen reclaimed the penlight and began inspecting the effigy, running her beam along the side. “Then there must be some sort of actuator, a lever or something.”

  The immediacy of her faith astounded him. “So . . . you believe me?”

  “You saw what you saw, Jack.” She squatted down beside the sarcophagus, still searching. “Section four, rule three: ‘Sparks don’t lie.’ They may require interpretation, but they don’t”—Gwen cocked her head to one side, shining the light at the edge of the baker’s pastry—“lie. And here’s your proof. There’s a gap beneath the tart, hidden by the curve of Farriner’s hands.”

  “You mean the pie?”

  “No. I mean the tart. Small in size. Nearly vertical crust. I don’t see any room for argument here.” Her eyes narrowed. “Anyway, there’s a gap. Give us a hand, will you?” She grabbed the edges of the pastry and grunted, trying to turn it like a wheel. Jack joined her, and the pie-tart gave way to their efforts. It made a slow quarter turn, accompanied by a grinding noise from Farriner’s head.

  The two exchanged a glance and Gwen shifted her light. The baker’s lips had parted a fraction of an inch. “It’s working.” She let out a little laugh that told Jack she hadn’t been quite as confident in his spark as she had claimed. “It’s actually working.”

  “Hey. What happened to ‘Sparks don’t lie’?”

  “Oh, don’t be so sensitive. Come on. Let’s get it open.”

  They returned to their work, doubling their efforts and turning the pie-tart quarter by quarter until the baker’s mouth gaped open. Gwen hurried to the head and shined the light down inside, illuminating a tiny roll of parchment.

  Chapter 23

  “EASY, TIGER,” CAUTIONED Gwen as Jack reached for the paper. “If that turns to dust in your hands, we’re sunk.”

  He cast her a scowl that said duh, but he slowed down all the same. The roll of paper made a cringe-worthy scraping sound as he pulled it from the confines of the baker’s mouth, but it came out in one piece, and the two unrolled it together, laying it out on the effigy’s chest.

  Jack groaned. The parchment, barely the width of a grocery receipt, appeared to have once held three full paragraphs of tiny writing. Time had faded the script into the uniform brown of the paper. He could only read the top two lines. “The Last Confession of Thomas Farriner, Conduct of the King’s Bakehouse.” Jack shrugged. “Doesn’t tell us much, does it?”

  Gwen nodded, chewing her bottom lip. “Perhaps you should—”

  “Spark?” His eyes shifted from the clerk to the parchment and back again. “It’s paper.”

  She shook her head. “I was going to say you should run your fingers over the remains of the writing.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “You’re a tracker, silly. Your senses overlap—all of them.” Gwen wiggled her fingers at him. “Did you think your sense of touch got left out of the deal? Try it. You may be surprised.”

  Doing his best not to shake with the worry of destroying their only clue, Jack laid his fingertips on the writing. As soon as his skin touched the paper, black markings appeared in his mind like bumps on a gray wall. He almost jumped at the sensation. Still, they were only fragments of letters. “I see shapes, but . . . Wait. I’ve got something.” As Jack’s fingers slid down the page, a few of the fragments came together, enough that he could form them into words. “ ‘What . . . Pep-ys . . . saw . . . but . . . never wrote in . . . his . . . infernal book.” He pulled his hand back. “Pep-ys? Is that right?”

  “Peeps,” said Gwen. “That’s how you say it. Farriner must be talking about Samuel Pepys, a well-known figure of the Great Fire. Historians call him the Great Diarist.” She snorted. “I call him the Great Busybody. Pepys minded everyone’s business but his own, and he wrote all of it down in his diary, including a detailed account of the Great Fire.”

  Jack nodded. “Something this . . . Peeps . . . saw was important to the baker’s confession.”

  “Saw but never wrote,” Gwen corrected him, raising a finger. “Can you read any more?”

  Jack tried again, slowly moving his fingertips down the text. Nothing else made sense until he reached the final line. Farriner must have pressed harder with his final words. Jack could read them easily. “The mayor betrayed us, the cobbler saved us, and the ravens keep their secret.” He took his hands away. “Sounds like a nursery rhyme. All we’re missing are the butcher and the candlestick maker. What does it mean?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest.” The clerk handed him the light, then carefully rolled up the parchment and placed it back in the effigy’s mouth.

  “Wait. Don’t we need that?”

  “Section four, rule twenty-two: ‘Leave history the way you find it.’ The confession told us where to look next. It’s of no other use to us.” Gwen moved to the baker’s midsection. “I’ll need your help with the tart.”

  “Pie,” said Jack, if only to annoy her. He helped her turn the pastry in the opposite direction, slowly closing Farriner’s mouth. “The confession told us where to look? You mean the line about Pepys?”

  “Even better.” The baker’s lips ground closed once more, and Gwen stepped back, dusting off her hands. “I know where Pepys stood when he wrote it.�
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  To Jack’s great relief, Gwen did not take Pudding Lane when they left the church. She led him up the hill one block west of it, to the great column monument he had seen reflected in the blue glass at the artsy-loo—the monument with the dragon hidden in its mural.

  “In case you hadn’t guessed, this is the Monument to the Great Fire,” said Gwen, coming to a halt at the edge of the small square surrounding the edifice.

  Jack shielded his eyes to gaze up at the column. “Shouldn’t we have started here?”

  “It’s a monument about the fire,” said the clerk with a shrug, “raised years after the event by aristocrats who used the king’s money to build a hobby science lab rather than a real memorial.” She strolled ahead of him and turned, pointing up at a Latin inscription. “According to this, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke built this tower two hundred two feet high so its shadow would fall on the fated bakery. But why two hundred two feet, exactly?”

  Jack shrugged.

  Gwen gave him what he decided must be her know-it-all grin. “They wanted to hang a two-hundred-foot pendulum string inside. That’s why.” She backed toward the east end of the pedestal. “Come on. This isn’t really our destination.”

  Jack didn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off the Monument. Between the pedestal and the column, the mason had carved a layer of debris, as if the column were rising from the rubble of the ruined city. But the rubble had come to life before Jack’s eyes, shifting and grinding together. He could see bones amid the debris—legs and forearms, rib cages interlocked with one another. Round pieces Jack had mistaken for stones slowly turned in place, revealing empty eye sockets and broken jaws. A host of skulls stared down at him.

  Release us.

  Jack blinked. The sculpture returned to its benign, weathered appearance.

  Gwen stared back at him with concern. “Jack? Are you coming?”