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Aug. 4th, 2011 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
froodleHere is some more EI stuff for your eyes to gaze upon:
Part Seven
“Silly little things, what are you doing here?” someone said. “You know you don’t belong.”
The voice had a disturbingly saccharine, sing-song pitch to it. If Bertram and Earnest Wilson had been born girls instead of boys, thirty years of being sealed in giant rubber kitchenware and trapped on the cusp of adolescence would have given them voices like this – spun-sugar sticky-sweet frosting that set your teeth on edge and promised madness-inducing numbers of chemical additives. Mars braced himself for an unwelcome second helping of poodle-skirted insanity, and turned around.
Mega-eerie-voodoo-weirdness, he thought, should not come wearing flannel shirts and stonewashed denims. When the creeping insanity of a new hometown catches up to a kid, it should be in the form of a sentient cash machine or a freakishly anthropomorphasized violent weather event. It shouldn’t look like one of Syndi’s slightly-less-than-averagely-obnoxious classmates had just dropped ’round to study for a test and giggle insipidly about boys.
When she grinned at him, her smile revealed a set of perfectly average teeth, but it was stretched a little too wide for comfort and those so-very-normal-looking teeth were gritted just a little too tightly. To her left, Simon took an involuntary step back, and his feet rustled the detritus strewn across the floor. She turned towards him, and there was something hideously jerky in the way she moved.
“Little boy who comes in through the Sock Drawer,” she crooned. “Yes, we know all about you, a lost boy in a place for lost things.” She lunged forward, quick as a darting spider, and her slim hands with their round pink fingernails reached for Simon like some loathsome grasping thing in a dark place.
He yelped in surprise and fear when she seized his arm, too startled to stop her when she yanked him towards her, but she merely pulled him to her long enough to breathe deep before releasing him, shoving him backwards a little so that he stumbled and sat down hard among the discarded paper wrappers on the floor.
“You are welcome,” she said, and her voice now was cold and dismissive. Her gaze left him and came to rest on Dash for a moment. “That one too,” she said, in the same disinterested tone. She turned back to Mars, and the smile that wasn’t full of broken glass, but should have been, was back on her face.
“Not you though, little Topsider,” she told him. “With a mummy and a daddy and,” she sniffed, “A sister? Yes, a sister too. So many things up there to hold you tight, to keep you close and warm and safe while your friends are lost down here with us. What are you doing here, in this place for the misplaced?”
“You don’t know who that is?” said someone else. A male voice now, it came from the gloom above them, beyond the dim illumination that lit the shelves from a little above head-height.
“Who is it?” asked the girl. “What does he want?” She didn’t look up, but kept her eyes fixed on Marshall’s face.
There was a burst of activity from the murk overhead, then a teenaged boy stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the girl. He was a little taller, a little older, and seemed perfectly normal as long as you hadn’t just seen him come scuttling out of the darkness ten feet above your head.
“This is Marshall Teller, Ginny,” he said, taking her hand in his own. He smiled and nodded as he spoke. “He is known to us.”
“He is known,” Ginny agreed.
“We’ve heard about you,” said the boy.
“Took a stamp,” said Ginny. “Traded it for a monster’s claw. The claw held an airplane.” She looked at the boy. “They don’t usually do that.”
“No, they don’t,” he agreed pleasantly.
“Mister Lodgepoole had to leave us afterwards,” said Ginny.
“It was an unfortunate set of circumstances,” said the boy. He looked at Marshall. “Old Al took over running the Bureau then.”
“I heard,” said Marshall, struggling to keep his tone neutral in the face of such high-octane weirdness.
“It wasn’t right,” said Ginny. She clutched at the boy with her free hand. “He wasn’t qualified, Charley. It wasn’t right!”
“He tried hard,” said Charley. “But you need training to keep the Bureau running smoothly, and Al just wasn’t right for the job.”
“Certified Misappropriation Engineer,” muttered Mars.
Charley nodded. “Unfortunately, without proper handling, it becomes impossible to keep things around here in good working order.”
Ginny erupted into high-pitched, fractured giggles. “Good working order!” she squealed. “Not good. Not working. Not order.” She subsided again, then looked Mars straight in the eye. “We ate him.”
Behind the strange duo, Mars could see Dash’s eyes darting all around him, no doubt searching for an exit and trying to gage his chances of making it out in one piece. Sitting on the ground, Simon tried to hold himself as still as possible. His heart pounded in his chest and the blood roared in his ears, making it hard to hear, and even harder to think.
“We ate him,” said the girl again, and this time there was a plaintive note in her voice. Her companion released her hand in favour of putting a comforting arm across her shoulders, and pulled her close.
“It couldn’t be helped,” said Charley softly, stroking her hair with his free hand. His words were addressed to the girl at his side, but his eyes never left Marshall’s face.
“Will we need to eat them too?” whispered Ginny, and something ancient and ugly and vicious raised its head and looked at Marshall through her eyes.
PART EIGHT
The net dropping out of the darkness and landing on top of him surprised Marshall, but not quite as much as hearing someone scream “Get him, Radford, get him!” in his ear right before he was knocked to the ground and held there.
From his current position an enhanced close-up view of the unswept wooden floor filled his entire field of vision, but he could hear Ginny’s rage-filled screeching, which almost drowned out Dash’s cursing and Simon’s involuntary cry of alarm. There was the squeak of rubber-soled sneakers on the hardwood floor and the muffled thump of bodies colliding, then an unfamiliar voice, different from the first, said, “For crying out loud, Radford, get off that poor kid! You can see he’s not going anywhere.”
When the weight on his back lifted, Mars was able to sit up and survey the scene through the thick black ropes of the net. Dash, Simon and Charley were already sitting up beneath nets of their own, and he could tell from the way they held themselves that their hands hand been bound behind their backs. Ginny lay on her stomach, mouth taped and hands and feet lashed together. Her eyes were closed and she breathed shallowly.
Their apparent captors were two college-aged kids, a boy and a girl, both in freshly laundered, neatly pressed old-fashioned dress shirts that were nonetheless turning yellow with age, brown shapeless cardigans, green cashier’s visors and polka-dotted bowties.
“Get Radford on the line,” said the girl. “Let him know we got some of his Code Fives.” The boy nodded and crossed to the front desk, shoving stacks of paper aside until he unearthed the old-fashioned microphone. The girl pulled open one of the many cupboards that lined the walls and examined her reflection in the mirror on the inner door. She frowned a little as she adjusted her bowtie and wiped dust from the knees of her thread-bare black tuxedo pants.
“How do you know Radford?” asked Simon. The boy and the girl exchanged a brief glance, but said nothing. “How do you know him?” Simon persisted.
The microphone in the boy’s hand sputtered noisily to life. He listened intently for a moment, then murmured a response too quiet for the others to hear. He turned to the girl, rolling his eyes.
“He wants us to identify them before he sends a Claw for pick-up,” he said. “Do you have your scanner?” The girl nodded, producing from inside her cardigan something that looked for all the world like the inner cardboard tubes from a dozen rolls of toilet paper, taped together and covered in tinfoil.
She walked back to the hostages and pointed the device at Ginny. “Virginia Dare,” she said, then as the boy repeated this information into the microphone, aimed it at Charley. “Charles Brewster Ross.” Charley stared at the floor, lost in his own misery, seemingly oblivious to everything going on around him. The girl in the bowtie next pointed her bizarre contraption at Simon. “Simon Holmes.” Her companion repeated this, then looked up quickly as the radio crackled in response.
“Radford says he’s not due down here for another five years,” he said.
The girl shrugged. “So he’s ahead of schedule. If he’s that far in front, maybe next time he can lend us a hand on the Code Threes instead.” She pointed at Mars. “Marshall Teller.” She looked at the boy. “Rubber stamp Marshall Teller?”
The boy mumbled into the microphone again and nodded as the reply came through. “Apparently, yeah.”
The girl shook her head in wonderment. “He’s not supposed to be here at all, and he shows up twice in two years. What’s he doing down here?” She turned to Mars, raising her voice slightly as if dealing with someone slightly deaf or slightly slow, or possibly both. “What are you doing down here, Marshall Teller?”
Marshall met her gaze straight-on. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”
“Sorry,” said the boy, deadpan. “This is the Bureau of the Lost. You want the Agency of Tit-for-Tat over in the next county.”
The girl laughed. “Never mind, Rubber Stamp Marshall Teller. You’ll be back with the Code Fives soon enough, and then you’ll be Radford’s problem instead of ours.” She pointed her device at Dash. “Last one - huh.”
“What?”
“It says he doesn’t have a code,” she said, scowling at the object in her hand.
“Batteries must be low,” said the boy. The girl swung the device back at Mars and shook her head. “It registers the others, no problem. Just this one.” She dropped to a crouch so as to be eye-level with the seated Dash. “How did you get rid of your code, little Fiver?”
Not knowing how to respond to such a bizarre question, Dash took refuge in the familiar – hostility. “What’s it to you?” he snarled.
The girl shrugged. “Nothing, really. You’re obviously not one of ours, so we can ship you out of here with your little friends as soon as the authorisation comes though.” She inclined her head towards the boy. “Just tell Radford one of them’s unCoded. He can deal with it.”
The boy nodded and relayed this to the person on the other end of the microphone. A staccato burst of information came through in response, and there was an indistinct yet vehement exchange. Finally, the boy picked up a pen from amidst the debris on the desk and jotted down five lines of alpha-numeric code on the back of a flyer advertising a long out-of-business fast food chain, repeating them as he went. Then he clicked the microphone off and came around from behind the desk, shoving the scrap of paper into his cardigan pocket.
“There’s a backlog on the Claws,” he said. “It’ll be about forty-eight hours before pickup. He says to keep Ginny chained, but,” and here he affected a nasally voice, “‘You can untie the others if you consider yourselves capable of handling it.’”
“Fucking Radford,” exploded the girl. “He loses control of his Area, lets half his Codes get loose and run around messing up everyone else’s inventory and then has the nerve to ask us if we can handle it. Of course we can handle it, we’re not the fucking retards who let a bunch of Misplaced humans go crazy all over the fucking Bureau!”
The boy nodded vehemently. “And giving us shit just because some of his deliveries are ahead of schedule! How is that our fault? He’s in charge of Area Five, not us. We don’t come crying to him every time a ballpoint pen cap shows up early or some girl doesn’t lose her fucking teddy at the right time.” He adopted a nasally voice once again. “‘Well if it doesn’t scan as Code Five how do you know it’s my responsibility?’ Give me a fucking break, it’s clearly a fucking human! It’s not like I’m going to mistakenly send him a… a fucking llama or something, is it?”
“I would steal one from Area Four and do that just to mess with him if Radford wasn’t such a sweetie,” said the girl. “But I’d feel bad making her have to deal with that fucking douchebag.” She looked back at their captives. “Do you think we should feed them?”
“Do we have anything to give them?”
“Not here, but we could talk to Radford in Area One and get something sent over.”
“I spoke to Radford the other day – Area One is still completely fucked, they have no idea what their inventory is or when it expires.” The boy stared at Marshall. “How often do you think they need to eat?”
“The Code Fours get one feeding a day. They’re basically the same, right?” She too stared at Marshall. “Do you need feeding?”
Marshall stared back at them, his eyes flicking between the two, mind working overtime to make sense of their bizarre exchange. Finally he managed to dredge up a useful scrap of information from his last trip to the Bureau of the Lost.
“Code Fives are humans, right?” he ventured.
“Yes,” said the boy. “But you’re on the boundaries of Areas Two and Three, so we don’t have any feed for you here.”
“What are Areas Two and Three?” asked Marshall.
“Area Two, Low Value Consumer Goods,” said the girl.
“Area Three, Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms,” said the boy.
“We get a lot of overlap, so we tend to work together quite a bit,” said the girl.
“Like when a bunch of Fivers sneak into our territory and start messing up our inventory,” said the boy. “And on that subject, give me my fucking Jackalope back.” He switched his gaze from Marshall in order to glare at Dash, who, true to form, glared mulishly back at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Marshall rolled his eyes. “Just give them the Jackalope,” he said wearily.
For a moment he thought Dash would make an already tense (and highly weird) situation worse (and that much weirder) by picking a fight over a stuffed Jackalope, but after a loaded silence Dash shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t worth his time to discuss further, and motioned with his head to a far corner of the room, where the Jackalope lay on its side amidst the accumulated drifts of scrap.
The boy bounded over and snatched it up, brushing dust and fluff from its fur. He produced a brown cardboard luggage label with “LOST” stamped on it in bright red, deftly looped it ’round one of the Jackalope’s antlers, then placed it reverentially on the long wooden counter. He hoisted himself up alongside it, then slid over to put the counter between himself and the rest of the room. He examined the tag closely, then touch-typed a lengthy code into the keypad in front of him. Seconds later, a mechanical Claw descended from the ceiling, picked up the Jackalope, then with a “whoosh” of displaced air, vanished into the darkness overhead.
“I thought you said there was a backlog on the Claws,” said Mars.
“There is,” said the girl. “In Area Five. The Claws for Areas Two and Three are running just fine.”
“Probably because we actually know how to do our jobs,” said the boy.
“Which is what?” asked Mars. “Exactly, I mean.”
“We already said,” said the girl. “I’m Low Value Consumer Goods, or Code Twos. He’s Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms.”
“Otherwise known as Code Threes,” said the boy.
“And Radford is in charge of Code Fives, or humans,” said Mars.
“Radford from Area Five is, yeah,” said the girl.
“He’s also a self-important jackass,” said the boy.
“Did you hear, he totally made Radford cry over that car crash last month?” said the girl. “I mean, how is it Radford’s fault that Radford is letting his stupid humans wander around Area Nine without so much as a by-your-leave and one of them gets into a wreck?”
“Ugh,” said the boy. “Radford needs to get the fuck over himself, seriously.”
Mars was turning the conversation over in his mind so hard his head hurt. “Is there more than one Radford?” he ventured.
They stared at him as if he had grown a second head.
“Of course there is,” said the boy.
“Did you somehow think we were one person cleverly tricking you into thinking we were two?” said the girl.
Simon was catching on now. “So you’re both called Radford?” he asked.
“What else would we be called?” said the boy, seeming genuinely bemused by their confusion.
“Do you have first names?”
“Radford is our first name,” said the boy Radford.
“Do you have last names, then?”
“Radford is our last name,” said the girl Radford.
Dash couldn’t resist. “So your names are Radford Radford?” he demanded sarcastically. The two Radfords stared at him in blank incomprehension.
“Our names are Radford,” said the girl Radford, speaking slowly and distinctly.
“Then how do you tell each other apart?” Simon wanted to know.
The two Radfords looked at him, then at each other, then back at Simon.
“We don’t… look the same?” the girl Radford said, hesitantly. She turned to the boy Radford. “Can they not recognise faces, do you think?” He shrugged.
“How many Radfords are there?” asked Mars.
“As many as there need to be,” said the girl Radford.
“What does that even mean?” Dash demanded, getting impatient now.
“Radfords look after stores. When a store needs looking after, there’s always a Radford. When there isn’t a store, there isn’t a Radford.”
Mars tried a different tack. “Where I live, in Eerie, there was a guy called Radford who turned out not to really be Radford. After he left, there was another Radford who took over.”
“What happened to the first Radford?” the girl Radford wanted to know.
“It turned out he was Fred Suggs, compulsive imposter,” said Simon.
“Oh, yeah,” said the boy Radford. “I heard about that guy.”
“I heard being Topside made him crazy,” said the girl Radford. “He started wanting all kinds of new names for himself and dressing in weird disguises. They had to send a replacement even though there wasn’t technically a store to mind. Head Office had to get involved and everything.” She looked at the trussed-up boys. “What happened to him?”
“He took over the store,” said Mars.
“No,” said the boy Radford. “What happened to the first Radford?”
“He was a bank teller for a bit,” said Simon. “Then I think he was a milkman.”
The boy Radford shook his head. “That’s no job for a Radford,” he said sadly.
If his hands had been free, Mars would have rubbed his temples at this point. “So he really was Radford after all?”
“Of course,” said the girl Radford.
“And the Radford that came after him?”
“Also Radford,” said the boy Radford.
“So let me get this straight,” said Mars. “You’re all called Radford. You all mind stores. None of you have any names other than Radford, none of you know how many Radfords there are out there, you only show up when a store needs minding and when it doesn’t, you disappear again, and none of you knows where you go or where you come from?”
“Yes,” said the girl Radford.
“And none of you find that confusing?”
“No,” said the boy Radford.
“And you’re okay with going through life without having names of your own?”
“We have names of our own,” pointed out the girl Radford. “Our names are Radford.”
“Tell me something else,” Simon interjected hastily upon seeing the look on Marshall’s face. “You,” he nodded as best he could towards the girl Radford, “look after Area Two.” She nodded. “Which is where the Bureau of the Lost keeps cheap lost household items…”
“Low Value Consumer Goods,” corrected the girl Radford.
“Sorry, Low Value Consumer Goods,” said Simon. “Which come up on your scanner as Code Twos.” She nodded. “And you,” Simon continued, looking at the boy Radford, “look after Area Three, Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms.”
The boy Radford beamed. “Good memory!” he said. The girl Radford scowled at him, and he poked his tongue out in response.
Simon hid an amused smile with the ease of long practice. “And those come up when scanned as Code Threes.”
“Right,” said the boy Radford.
“So how many Areas does the Bureau of the Lost have?” asked Simon.
“Fourteen,” said the boy Radford.
“And Head Office,” said the girl Radford.
“So there are fifteen Radfords in the Bureau of the Lost?”
“Fourteen,” said the boy Radford.
“Head Office isn’t a store,” said the girl Radford, in a tone that Simon felt was a little more condescending than was strictly necessary. “They don’t need a Radford there.”
“If you were looking for something specific down here,” said Simon, carefully concealing his irritation. “How would you know where to look for it?”
“The card catalogue,” said the boy Radford. “We keep ours updated, unlike some areas I could mention.” The girl Radford made an affirmative-sounding noise. “Everything that comes to the Bureau is filed under three headings – the name of the person who lost it, surname first; chronologically by the date it was lost; and the Code it was stored under.”
Mars and Simon glanced at Dash. It was clear from the look on his face that he had grasped the uselessness of a reference system that required him to know either his name or the date his entire life had suddenly vanished.
“What if you didn’t have that?” asked Mars.
“I guess you could talk to Head Office-” the boy Radford began, but the girl Radford cut him off.
“Why do you ask?” she said, eyes narrowing with suspicion.
Simon shrugged, concentrating on looking guileless. “You said I would be here again in five years. I figured I should learn as much about this place as I can, in preparation for when I come back.”
“You won’t be back,” said the girl Radford. “You’re already here.”
“What?” Simon couldn’t stop the note of horror that entered his voice.
The boy Radford shrugged. “This is the Bureau of the Lost. Lost things gravitate here. You came here, so you must be lost. If you’re lost, you belong down here.”
“There’ll probably be some administrative headaches when you get to Area Five, since you’re early,” said the girl Radford, “But bottom line is, you and your rubber-stamp-stealing friend and your friend who somehow managed to hide himself from the Code Scanner are all Misplaced Persons now, and in less than two days, Area Five’s Claws will come and take you back there and that’s where you’ll stay forever.” She paused. “Do you boys like to play Monopoly?”
“Silly little things, what are you doing here?” someone said. “You know you don’t belong.”
The voice had a disturbingly saccharine, sing-song pitch to it. If Bertram and Earnest Wilson had been born girls instead of boys, thirty years of being sealed in giant rubber kitchenware and trapped on the cusp of adolescence would have given them voices like this – spun-sugar sticky-sweet frosting that set your teeth on edge and promised madness-inducing numbers of chemical additives. Mars braced himself for an unwelcome second helping of poodle-skirted insanity, and turned around.
Mega-eerie-voodoo-weirdness, he thought, should not come wearing flannel shirts and stonewashed denims. When the creeping insanity of a new hometown catches up to a kid, it should be in the form of a sentient cash machine or a freakishly anthropomorphasized violent weather event. It shouldn’t look like one of Syndi’s slightly-less-than-averagely-obnoxious classmates had just dropped ’round to study for a test and giggle insipidly about boys.
When she grinned at him, her smile revealed a set of perfectly average teeth, but it was stretched a little too wide for comfort and those so-very-normal-looking teeth were gritted just a little too tightly. To her left, Simon took an involuntary step back, and his feet rustled the detritus strewn across the floor. She turned towards him, and there was something hideously jerky in the way she moved.
“Little boy who comes in through the Sock Drawer,” she crooned. “Yes, we know all about you, a lost boy in a place for lost things.” She lunged forward, quick as a darting spider, and her slim hands with their round pink fingernails reached for Simon like some loathsome grasping thing in a dark place.
He yelped in surprise and fear when she seized his arm, too startled to stop her when she yanked him towards her, but she merely pulled him to her long enough to breathe deep before releasing him, shoving him backwards a little so that he stumbled and sat down hard among the discarded paper wrappers on the floor.
“You are welcome,” she said, and her voice now was cold and dismissive. Her gaze left him and came to rest on Dash for a moment. “That one too,” she said, in the same disinterested tone. She turned back to Mars, and the smile that wasn’t full of broken glass, but should have been, was back on her face.
“Not you though, little Topsider,” she told him. “With a mummy and a daddy and,” she sniffed, “A sister? Yes, a sister too. So many things up there to hold you tight, to keep you close and warm and safe while your friends are lost down here with us. What are you doing here, in this place for the misplaced?”
“You don’t know who that is?” said someone else. A male voice now, it came from the gloom above them, beyond the dim illumination that lit the shelves from a little above head-height.
“Who is it?” asked the girl. “What does he want?” She didn’t look up, but kept her eyes fixed on Marshall’s face.
There was a burst of activity from the murk overhead, then a teenaged boy stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the girl. He was a little taller, a little older, and seemed perfectly normal as long as you hadn’t just seen him come scuttling out of the darkness ten feet above your head.
“This is Marshall Teller, Ginny,” he said, taking her hand in his own. He smiled and nodded as he spoke. “He is known to us.”
“He is known,” Ginny agreed.
“We’ve heard about you,” said the boy.
“Took a stamp,” said Ginny. “Traded it for a monster’s claw. The claw held an airplane.” She looked at the boy. “They don’t usually do that.”
“No, they don’t,” he agreed pleasantly.
“Mister Lodgepoole had to leave us afterwards,” said Ginny.
“It was an unfortunate set of circumstances,” said the boy. He looked at Marshall. “Old Al took over running the Bureau then.”
“I heard,” said Marshall, struggling to keep his tone neutral in the face of such high-octane weirdness.
“It wasn’t right,” said Ginny. She clutched at the boy with her free hand. “He wasn’t qualified, Charley. It wasn’t right!”
“He tried hard,” said Charley. “But you need training to keep the Bureau running smoothly, and Al just wasn’t right for the job.”
“Certified Misappropriation Engineer,” muttered Mars.
Charley nodded. “Unfortunately, without proper handling, it becomes impossible to keep things around here in good working order.”
Ginny erupted into high-pitched, fractured giggles. “Good working order!” she squealed. “Not good. Not working. Not order.” She subsided again, then looked Mars straight in the eye. “We ate him.”
Behind the strange duo, Mars could see Dash’s eyes darting all around him, no doubt searching for an exit and trying to gage his chances of making it out in one piece. Sitting on the ground, Simon tried to hold himself as still as possible. His heart pounded in his chest and the blood roared in his ears, making it hard to hear, and even harder to think.
“We ate him,” said the girl again, and this time there was a plaintive note in her voice. Her companion released her hand in favour of putting a comforting arm across her shoulders, and pulled her close.
“It couldn’t be helped,” said Charley softly, stroking her hair with his free hand. His words were addressed to the girl at his side, but his eyes never left Marshall’s face.
“Will we need to eat them too?” whispered Ginny, and something ancient and ugly and vicious raised its head and looked at Marshall through her eyes.
The net dropping out of the darkness and landing on top of him surprised Marshall, but not quite as much as hearing someone scream “Get him, Radford, get him!” in his ear right before he was knocked to the ground and held there.
From his current position an enhanced close-up view of the unswept wooden floor filled his entire field of vision, but he could hear Ginny’s rage-filled screeching, which almost drowned out Dash’s cursing and Simon’s involuntary cry of alarm. There was the squeak of rubber-soled sneakers on the hardwood floor and the muffled thump of bodies colliding, then an unfamiliar voice, different from the first, said, “For crying out loud, Radford, get off that poor kid! You can see he’s not going anywhere.”
When the weight on his back lifted, Mars was able to sit up and survey the scene through the thick black ropes of the net. Dash, Simon and Charley were already sitting up beneath nets of their own, and he could tell from the way they held themselves that their hands hand been bound behind their backs. Ginny lay on her stomach, mouth taped and hands and feet lashed together. Her eyes were closed and she breathed shallowly.
Their apparent captors were two college-aged kids, a boy and a girl, both in freshly laundered, neatly pressed old-fashioned dress shirts that were nonetheless turning yellow with age, brown shapeless cardigans, green cashier’s visors and polka-dotted bowties.
“Get Radford on the line,” said the girl. “Let him know we got some of his Code Fives.” The boy nodded and crossed to the front desk, shoving stacks of paper aside until he unearthed the old-fashioned microphone. The girl pulled open one of the many cupboards that lined the walls and examined her reflection in the mirror on the inner door. She frowned a little as she adjusted her bowtie and wiped dust from the knees of her thread-bare black tuxedo pants.
“How do you know Radford?” asked Simon. The boy and the girl exchanged a brief glance, but said nothing. “How do you know him?” Simon persisted.
The microphone in the boy’s hand sputtered noisily to life. He listened intently for a moment, then murmured a response too quiet for the others to hear. He turned to the girl, rolling his eyes.
“He wants us to identify them before he sends a Claw for pick-up,” he said. “Do you have your scanner?” The girl nodded, producing from inside her cardigan something that looked for all the world like the inner cardboard tubes from a dozen rolls of toilet paper, taped together and covered in tinfoil.
She walked back to the hostages and pointed the device at Ginny. “Virginia Dare,” she said, then as the boy repeated this information into the microphone, aimed it at Charley. “Charles Brewster Ross.” Charley stared at the floor, lost in his own misery, seemingly oblivious to everything going on around him. The girl in the bowtie next pointed her bizarre contraption at Simon. “Simon Holmes.” Her companion repeated this, then looked up quickly as the radio crackled in response.
“Radford says he’s not due down here for another five years,” he said.
The girl shrugged. “So he’s ahead of schedule. If he’s that far in front, maybe next time he can lend us a hand on the Code Threes instead.” She pointed at Mars. “Marshall Teller.” She looked at the boy. “Rubber stamp Marshall Teller?”
The boy mumbled into the microphone again and nodded as the reply came through. “Apparently, yeah.”
The girl shook her head in wonderment. “He’s not supposed to be here at all, and he shows up twice in two years. What’s he doing down here?” She turned to Mars, raising her voice slightly as if dealing with someone slightly deaf or slightly slow, or possibly both. “What are you doing down here, Marshall Teller?”
Marshall met her gaze straight-on. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”
“Sorry,” said the boy, deadpan. “This is the Bureau of the Lost. You want the Agency of Tit-for-Tat over in the next county.”
The girl laughed. “Never mind, Rubber Stamp Marshall Teller. You’ll be back with the Code Fives soon enough, and then you’ll be Radford’s problem instead of ours.” She pointed her device at Dash. “Last one - huh.”
“What?”
“It says he doesn’t have a code,” she said, scowling at the object in her hand.
“Batteries must be low,” said the boy. The girl swung the device back at Mars and shook her head. “It registers the others, no problem. Just this one.” She dropped to a crouch so as to be eye-level with the seated Dash. “How did you get rid of your code, little Fiver?”
Not knowing how to respond to such a bizarre question, Dash took refuge in the familiar – hostility. “What’s it to you?” he snarled.
The girl shrugged. “Nothing, really. You’re obviously not one of ours, so we can ship you out of here with your little friends as soon as the authorisation comes though.” She inclined her head towards the boy. “Just tell Radford one of them’s unCoded. He can deal with it.”
The boy nodded and relayed this to the person on the other end of the microphone. A staccato burst of information came through in response, and there was an indistinct yet vehement exchange. Finally, the boy picked up a pen from amidst the debris on the desk and jotted down five lines of alpha-numeric code on the back of a flyer advertising a long out-of-business fast food chain, repeating them as he went. Then he clicked the microphone off and came around from behind the desk, shoving the scrap of paper into his cardigan pocket.
“There’s a backlog on the Claws,” he said. “It’ll be about forty-eight hours before pickup. He says to keep Ginny chained, but,” and here he affected a nasally voice, “‘You can untie the others if you consider yourselves capable of handling it.’”
“Fucking Radford,” exploded the girl. “He loses control of his Area, lets half his Codes get loose and run around messing up everyone else’s inventory and then has the nerve to ask us if we can handle it. Of course we can handle it, we’re not the fucking retards who let a bunch of Misplaced humans go crazy all over the fucking Bureau!”
The boy nodded vehemently. “And giving us shit just because some of his deliveries are ahead of schedule! How is that our fault? He’s in charge of Area Five, not us. We don’t come crying to him every time a ballpoint pen cap shows up early or some girl doesn’t lose her fucking teddy at the right time.” He adopted a nasally voice once again. “‘Well if it doesn’t scan as Code Five how do you know it’s my responsibility?’ Give me a fucking break, it’s clearly a fucking human! It’s not like I’m going to mistakenly send him a… a fucking llama or something, is it?”
“I would steal one from Area Four and do that just to mess with him if Radford wasn’t such a sweetie,” said the girl. “But I’d feel bad making her have to deal with that fucking douchebag.” She looked back at their captives. “Do you think we should feed them?”
“Do we have anything to give them?”
“Not here, but we could talk to Radford in Area One and get something sent over.”
“I spoke to Radford the other day – Area One is still completely fucked, they have no idea what their inventory is or when it expires.” The boy stared at Marshall. “How often do you think they need to eat?”
“The Code Fours get one feeding a day. They’re basically the same, right?” She too stared at Marshall. “Do you need feeding?”
Marshall stared back at them, his eyes flicking between the two, mind working overtime to make sense of their bizarre exchange. Finally he managed to dredge up a useful scrap of information from his last trip to the Bureau of the Lost.
“Code Fives are humans, right?” he ventured.
“Yes,” said the boy. “But you’re on the boundaries of Areas Two and Three, so we don’t have any feed for you here.”
“What are Areas Two and Three?” asked Marshall.
“Area Two, Low Value Consumer Goods,” said the girl.
“Area Three, Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms,” said the boy.
“We get a lot of overlap, so we tend to work together quite a bit,” said the girl.
“Like when a bunch of Fivers sneak into our territory and start messing up our inventory,” said the boy. “And on that subject, give me my fucking Jackalope back.” He switched his gaze from Marshall in order to glare at Dash, who, true to form, glared mulishly back at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Marshall rolled his eyes. “Just give them the Jackalope,” he said wearily.
For a moment he thought Dash would make an already tense (and highly weird) situation worse (and that much weirder) by picking a fight over a stuffed Jackalope, but after a loaded silence Dash shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t worth his time to discuss further, and motioned with his head to a far corner of the room, where the Jackalope lay on its side amidst the accumulated drifts of scrap.
The boy bounded over and snatched it up, brushing dust and fluff from its fur. He produced a brown cardboard luggage label with “LOST” stamped on it in bright red, deftly looped it ’round one of the Jackalope’s antlers, then placed it reverentially on the long wooden counter. He hoisted himself up alongside it, then slid over to put the counter between himself and the rest of the room. He examined the tag closely, then touch-typed a lengthy code into the keypad in front of him. Seconds later, a mechanical Claw descended from the ceiling, picked up the Jackalope, then with a “whoosh” of displaced air, vanished into the darkness overhead.
“I thought you said there was a backlog on the Claws,” said Mars.
“There is,” said the girl. “In Area Five. The Claws for Areas Two and Three are running just fine.”
“Probably because we actually know how to do our jobs,” said the boy.
“Which is what?” asked Mars. “Exactly, I mean.”
“We already said,” said the girl. “I’m Low Value Consumer Goods, or Code Twos. He’s Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms.”
“Otherwise known as Code Threes,” said the boy.
“And Radford is in charge of Code Fives, or humans,” said Mars.
“Radford from Area Five is, yeah,” said the girl.
“He’s also a self-important jackass,” said the boy.
“Did you hear, he totally made Radford cry over that car crash last month?” said the girl. “I mean, how is it Radford’s fault that Radford is letting his stupid humans wander around Area Nine without so much as a by-your-leave and one of them gets into a wreck?”
“Ugh,” said the boy. “Radford needs to get the fuck over himself, seriously.”
Mars was turning the conversation over in his mind so hard his head hurt. “Is there more than one Radford?” he ventured.
They stared at him as if he had grown a second head.
“Of course there is,” said the boy.
“Did you somehow think we were one person cleverly tricking you into thinking we were two?” said the girl.
Simon was catching on now. “So you’re both called Radford?” he asked.
“What else would we be called?” said the boy, seeming genuinely bemused by their confusion.
“Do you have first names?”
“Radford is our first name,” said the boy Radford.
“Do you have last names, then?”
“Radford is our last name,” said the girl Radford.
Dash couldn’t resist. “So your names are Radford Radford?” he demanded sarcastically. The two Radfords stared at him in blank incomprehension.
“Our names are Radford,” said the girl Radford, speaking slowly and distinctly.
“Then how do you tell each other apart?” Simon wanted to know.
The two Radfords looked at him, then at each other, then back at Simon.
“We don’t… look the same?” the girl Radford said, hesitantly. She turned to the boy Radford. “Can they not recognise faces, do you think?” He shrugged.
“How many Radfords are there?” asked Mars.
“As many as there need to be,” said the girl Radford.
“What does that even mean?” Dash demanded, getting impatient now.
“Radfords look after stores. When a store needs looking after, there’s always a Radford. When there isn’t a store, there isn’t a Radford.”
Mars tried a different tack. “Where I live, in Eerie, there was a guy called Radford who turned out not to really be Radford. After he left, there was another Radford who took over.”
“What happened to the first Radford?” the girl Radford wanted to know.
“It turned out he was Fred Suggs, compulsive imposter,” said Simon.
“Oh, yeah,” said the boy Radford. “I heard about that guy.”
“I heard being Topside made him crazy,” said the girl Radford. “He started wanting all kinds of new names for himself and dressing in weird disguises. They had to send a replacement even though there wasn’t technically a store to mind. Head Office had to get involved and everything.” She looked at the trussed-up boys. “What happened to him?”
“He took over the store,” said Mars.
“No,” said the boy Radford. “What happened to the first Radford?”
“He was a bank teller for a bit,” said Simon. “Then I think he was a milkman.”
The boy Radford shook his head. “That’s no job for a Radford,” he said sadly.
If his hands had been free, Mars would have rubbed his temples at this point. “So he really was Radford after all?”
“Of course,” said the girl Radford.
“And the Radford that came after him?”
“Also Radford,” said the boy Radford.
“So let me get this straight,” said Mars. “You’re all called Radford. You all mind stores. None of you have any names other than Radford, none of you know how many Radfords there are out there, you only show up when a store needs minding and when it doesn’t, you disappear again, and none of you knows where you go or where you come from?”
“Yes,” said the girl Radford.
“And none of you find that confusing?”
“No,” said the boy Radford.
“And you’re okay with going through life without having names of your own?”
“We have names of our own,” pointed out the girl Radford. “Our names are Radford.”
“Tell me something else,” Simon interjected hastily upon seeing the look on Marshall’s face. “You,” he nodded as best he could towards the girl Radford, “look after Area Two.” She nodded. “Which is where the Bureau of the Lost keeps cheap lost household items…”
“Low Value Consumer Goods,” corrected the girl Radford.
“Sorry, Low Value Consumer Goods,” said Simon. “Which come up on your scanner as Code Twos.” She nodded. “And you,” Simon continued, looking at the boy Radford, “look after Area Three, Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms.”
The boy Radford beamed. “Good memory!” he said. The girl Radford scowled at him, and he poked his tongue out in response.
Simon hid an amused smile with the ease of long practice. “And those come up when scanned as Code Threes.”
“Right,” said the boy Radford.
“So how many Areas does the Bureau of the Lost have?” asked Simon.
“Fourteen,” said the boy Radford.
“And Head Office,” said the girl Radford.
“So there are fifteen Radfords in the Bureau of the Lost?”
“Fourteen,” said the boy Radford.
“Head Office isn’t a store,” said the girl Radford, in a tone that Simon felt was a little more condescending than was strictly necessary. “They don’t need a Radford there.”
“If you were looking for something specific down here,” said Simon, carefully concealing his irritation. “How would you know where to look for it?”
“The card catalogue,” said the boy Radford. “We keep ours updated, unlike some areas I could mention.” The girl Radford made an affirmative-sounding noise. “Everything that comes to the Bureau is filed under three headings – the name of the person who lost it, surname first; chronologically by the date it was lost; and the Code it was stored under.”
Mars and Simon glanced at Dash. It was clear from the look on his face that he had grasped the uselessness of a reference system that required him to know either his name or the date his entire life had suddenly vanished.
“What if you didn’t have that?” asked Mars.
“I guess you could talk to Head Office-” the boy Radford began, but the girl Radford cut him off.
“Why do you ask?” she said, eyes narrowing with suspicion.
Simon shrugged, concentrating on looking guileless. “You said I would be here again in five years. I figured I should learn as much about this place as I can, in preparation for when I come back.”
“You won’t be back,” said the girl Radford. “You’re already here.”
“What?” Simon couldn’t stop the note of horror that entered his voice.
The boy Radford shrugged. “This is the Bureau of the Lost. Lost things gravitate here. You came here, so you must be lost. If you’re lost, you belong down here.”
“There’ll probably be some administrative headaches when you get to Area Five, since you’re early,” said the girl Radford, “But bottom line is, you and your rubber-stamp-stealing friend and your friend who somehow managed to hide himself from the Code Scanner are all Misplaced Persons now, and in less than two days, Area Five’s Claws will come and take you back there and that’s where you’ll stay forever.” She paused. “Do you boys like to play Monopoly?”
