Page 15 of Lost in the Moment and Found

Antsy wanted so badly to argue, but she wanted even more to rest, and so she merely nodded and followed the black-and-white bird as he pushed himself back into the air and went gliding into the hall.

The employees-only portion of the Shop Where the Lost Things Go was a labyrinth, beginning with a short hall leading to four different doors. Hudson swooped so that the tip of his right wing brushed against one of them. “Here,” he said. “Go here.”

Obedient and exhausted, Antsy opened the door, which behaved like any other door, offering no resistance, no smell of ozone. On the other side, a flight of stairs beckoned, narrow and plain and simple. The steps were worn, unpainted wood, and the bannister was polished by the passage of many hands. Hudson swept upward, and Antsy followed to the landing, where another hallway opened out.

“This way,” called the bird, and she continued following, too tired to argue.

At the end of the hall was a door.

On the other side of the door was a room. It was small, and as simple as the stairs, with white walls, a tiny dresser, and a single bed pushed up against one wall. There was a window, but it showed nothing, only the deep darkness of a lingering night. A basin of water sat atop the dresser, and Antsy’s mouth was suddenly dry. “Is there a cup?” she asked. “Or a toilet?”

“Bathroom’s across the hall,” said Hudson. “Shop invited you in, so everything you need will be there. We’ll see you when you wake up.”

And he flew away, and Antsy was alone.

Cautious now, she left the room and crossed the hall. The bathroom was not as old-fashioned as she had briefly feared: there was a toilet, and a sink, and a shower, which she wrinkled her nose at and ignored. On the edge of the sink was a toothbrush, and a boar-bristle brush like the one she had at home, and a wooden hair pick and a bottle of oil like her mother used when she had to brush Antsy’s hair, which would break and snarl if brushed when it was dry, and had snapped three plastic brushes in half before her mom realized those wouldn’t work. Antsy ignored the hair supplies and picked up the toothbrush.

There was a tube of paste on the small shelf above the toilet when she looked around for it. She felt sure that hadn’t been there a moment before; maybe Hudson was right about the shop itself making arrangements for her. After a day of talking birds and impossible doors, that wouldn’t be the strangest thing ever.

Antsy brushed her teeth dutifully, used the facilities, and returned to the room where she was going to sleep. There was a nightgown folded on the pillow. Like all the linens, it smelled of lavender. She slipped it gratefully on and slid into the bed, and was asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes.

She could figure out how to get home when she woke up. She wasn’t going to do anyone any good by forcing herself to stay awake when she was already this exhausted.

And so the world slipped away into dazzling, dizzying dreams of marketplaces filled with cat-people and birds that talked, and Antsy was at peace.

PART IIISTAYING LOST

7ONE’S FOR SORROW, TWO’S FOR JOY

ANTSY WOKE TO SUNLIGHTstreaming through her bedroom window and the feeling of having forgotten something terribly important. That wasn’t unusual, really; after more than two years spent living and working in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, it was more common for her to wake up having forgotten something than it was for her to wake up knowing everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.

Her first six months in the shop, the thing she’d forgotten was the way to get home, which should have been the simplest thing in the world: she’d passed through a single door, looking for help, and what she’d found was a whole new world, one where the rules rarely flowed the same way from one day into the next, one where most of her time was spent in the company of a talking, opinionated magpie, or wandering through the outdoor shopping plazas of impossible realities that she could never seem to find a second time, one where doors and Doors were different things. All she had to do was find her way back to the right Door and she’d be out of here, easy as anything.

Only not so much, as it turned out. No matter how many Doors she opened—and she opened alotof Doors, she opened so many Doors that even Vineta was impressed—they didn’t lead to anything she recognized as the world she’d come from, or even anything close to it. Worlds of talking porcelain dolls and worlds of dragons, a terrifying world filled with dinosaursthat roared and chased and sold no wares, making Vineta’s claim that all the Doors opened on places with people somewhat more confusing. Another world cast entirely in black and white, where even Hudson seemed like an offensive riot of color against the monochrome sky.

After six months of Doors, Antsy had been forced to admit that she was here until she wasn’t lost anymore, and so had started helping more properly with the daily operation of the shop, for the sake of earning her keep. Her keep, such as it was, seemed to be a nebulous sort of thing; both Hudson and Vineta would exclaim over how much she’d managed to buy and how good her instincts were every time she came back from a shopping trip, something that was only possible when she opened one of the Doors to get there… or so she thought.

She had been in her seventh month at the shop, standing behind the counter while Hudson showed her how to work the register, when a door that hadn’t been there a moment before swung open in the wall across from them. It should have knocked over several shelves. It didn’t. It should have been prevented from opening by the pile of broken lawn gnomes Vineta had placed against the wall, claiming they would be decorative. They weren’t, and it wasn’t. Instead, it opened, and a girl stepped into the shop, blinking rapidly as she tried to take in everything around her at the same time.

Antsy straightened, feeling very mature and jaded as she watched the girl approach the counter. She’d been that new and impressed once. She’d been that awed by everything around her.

She’d been a fool. “Can I help you?” she asked, once the girl was close enough.

“Oh, I hope so,” said the girl, and hurried to the counter, eyes bright and oddly inhuman. Her pupils were sidewaysovals, like a goat’s, and not like a human’s pupils at all. “My mother said that if I turned around five times and hopped on one foot while I thought very, very hard about what I wanted to find, there would be a door behind the mirror, and so I did, and then there was, and now I’m here. I’ve lost my kitten. Mother says when things are lost, they always end up here, and I want my kitten to come home more than anything. Please, can you help me find her?”

Antsy, who hadn’t encountered anything like this before, looked hopelessly to Hudson. He ruffled his feathers the way he did when he was thinking—and wasn’t it funny, how normal that had become—and said, in a thoughtful tone of voice, “Kitten. It was alive when you lost it, yes? You’re not speaking of a metaphorical loss, the sort you grieve and learn from?”

“No,” said the girl firmly. “My brothers were running in and out of the house like wild things, even though they know it’s not allowed, and they left the front door open too long. And then, whoops and whist, my little Sparrow was gone, out into the big wide world, but alive as anything.”

Hudson bobbed his head. “All right, all right, a living lost thing, then. Antsy, have you seen the menagerie section yet?”

“No,” she replied, quietly confused. She’d seen all manner of things in her seven months at the shop, but nothing living apart from herself, Hudson, and Vineta.

“Then this is the thing you’ll learn today,” he said, sounding pleased with himself, and took off in a flurry of wings, flying in the slow, back-and-forth manner that always meant he was expecting her to follow. So she came around the side of the counter and trailed after him, the strange girl falling into step beside her.

The girl looked to be about the same age as her but, to Antsy’s surprise, was considerably shorter. Maybe people weren’tvery tall in the world that she came from. She walked with quick, economical steps, and was wearing a simple cotton dress printed with flowers that Antsy didn’t recognize, almost like daisies but with too many petals and eyes where the centers should have been. As Antsy watched, one of those flowers blinked, and she managed, barely, not to flinch away.

“Do you work here?” asked the girl, all innocence and excitement.

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