Chapter One
The Door Under the Clock
The Central Station had four platforms, nine hundred pigeons, one enormous clock, and, directly underneath the clock, where almost nobody ever noticed it, a little green door.
Bo noticed it, the first morning of the summer holidays, because her Uncle Otto walked straight at it, and Bo was holding his hand.
"Mind the step," said Uncle Otto, and unlocked the little green door with a little brass key, and took Bo inside her whole summer.
The room behind the door was long and tall and smelled of dust and peppermints and umbrella cloth. Shelves went up and up, higher than a house, with a ladder that slid along on wheels, and every shelf had a number, and every number had things on it. Umbrellas, a hundred at least, sleeping in racks like bats. A basket of single gloves. A shelf of hats. A crate of reading glasses, all folded, like a crowd of tiny sleeping storks. Three watches in a drawer marked THREE WATCHES. A tuba.
"A TUBA?" said Bo.
"Left on the number nine bus in April," said Uncle Otto, hanging up his coat. "The buses send us their things too. Somebody is missing that tuba enormously, Bo. You cannot half miss a tuba." He put on the apron that hung behind the door, the apron with the big pockets, and the room seemed to settle around him, the way a house settles when its person comes home. "Welcome to the Office of Lost Things. I am the Keeper. And you, if you would like the position, and I have cleared it with your mother and the stationmaster both, can be my summer assistant. The pay is one ice cream a day and everything I know."
