Page 8 of Office of the Lost

“Whyme?”he repeated, this time a little plaintively.

Crispin, looking forlorn, sat down on a purple-tinged log and sighed.“I don’t know.Bidulla Krönk—she’s my supervisor—didn’t say.She rarely explains my assignments.”

“Well, your boss made a mistake, ’cause I’m nobody special.I have no particular skills and no money at all, and although I’d love to be related to royalty or a billionaire or a celebrity or something, I’m not.My dad was a truck driver and my mom worked in an elementary school cafeteria.”And they’d both died before Leopold was ten, but that wasn’t relevant right now.

“The oracle isneverwrong,” Crispin announced huffily.

“Whatever.”Leopold was getting tired of this trip.He wanted to make himself a peanut-butter-and-onion sandwich, catch twenty minutes or so of some ridiculous reality show, and doze off to the sound of rain pounding onto the roof.He stood.“I’m just gonna walk around until I sober up.”

He started to do just that, but Crispin leapt up and ran to block him.“Leopold!You must remain with me.We’re late already and….”He took a few deep breaths before making a visible effort to get himself under control.“My perfecality rating is at risk of dropping below a perfect score.”

“Perfecality isn’t a word, dude.”But Crispin looked so upset, with his big purple eyes—wait, purple eyes?Whatever—and his distressed furry face, that Leopold didn’t have the heart to abandon him.Even if the guy had spiked his Zima.

Leopold flapped one hand.“Fine.I’m ready to go to your office place.Beam me up.”

“But that’s the problem.Thea should be bringing us to the Hall of Mirrors, but instead she’s… doing this.”He held up his phone.

A slightly tinny female voice was warbling about Tommy working on the docks.She was off-key and getting the lyrics wrong.

“That’s Bon Jovi,” Leopold pointed out.“Well, sort of.”

“This is Thea.Well, no.Thisobjectis my portable transport device, which often takes the form of a mirror but may incorporate any shiny surface.Thea is the intelligence behind the device.She is supposed to take me and my, er, acquisitions back to OotL, but she isn’t.There seems to be something wrong with her.”

“Oodle?Oh yeah.Gotcha.”Leopold scratched his head.The antlers were a little itchy.“Screen’s cracked.I feel your pain.I’ve never owned a phone that’s survived more than a week without me breaking it.Except one, an old… Nokia?That one I lost.At least yours is sort of working.”

The song ended abruptly, which was a relief.Crispin held up the phone and spoke loudly.“Thea.Please send us to the Hall of Mirrors this instant.”

“No can do,” sang the phone with a giggle.She repeated it on a loop.Then a loud exploding noise came from the phone, and Crispin dropped it in alarm as he let out a terrified yelp.It landed on a soft tuft of grass, and when he picked it up, the phone didn’t seem in any worse shape than it had been before.

Now it was singing about heaven and sex.Bruno Mars, Leopold thought.

Crispin returned to pleading and arguing with the phone.Leopold, growing bored, yanked up some foliage and began chewing.He was hungry and the stuff tasted pretty good.But even as he munched, worry started to gather somewhere beneath his skin.There was something wrong.This hallucination had been going on for a while, with no sign of disappearing.Even more troubling, though, was its consistency.Sure, the contents were damned weird—turning into an alien deer thing, being collected based on the orders of an oracle—but the details weren’t shifting.He and Crispin were having coherent if unlikely conversations.The greenery continued to be, more accurately, purplery.That howling noise was still going on in the distance.

Only… about that last part.The howling sounded as if it were growing closer, didn’t it?

“Uh, Crispin?”

“If I could get Thea to concentrate, perhaps she could suggest?—”

“Are there, um, predators in this place?”Which shouldn’t matter since none of this was real, but the hair—thefur—on Leopold’s nape was standing up, and his heart was racing, and his few bites of grass were feeling heavy and cold in his gut.

“Predators?I don’t know what—” Crispin stopped himself and tilted his head, as if hearing the howls for the first time.His eyes widened; his nostrils flared.Leopold was sniffing the air too, and there was a definite whiff of something.It was coppery and musky, and it made him shudder.

Crispin swallowed loudly.“Oh, crap.”

5

Crispin

Ishould run.I really should.

Crispin willed his limbs to move, yelled at them in his head, in fact, but they stayed rooted to the ground as the danger approached, the manic howls growing in intensity.

Thea flashed at him, the light like a kaleidoscope through the fractured screen.“Danger, Will Robinson!”

Leo was already halfway across the clearing, but his head snapped back at that.“I think your loopy little travel device drank some of that spiked Zima, too.”

“The Zima wasn’t spiked.”Or maybe it had been.His head felt weird.Instead of running from the howling, he felt a strange compulsion to runtowardit.

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