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!”
It had all happened so quickly. Gertie stood there with the small metal tool in her hand, wondering what else lived behind the doors.
“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.”