The Auctioneer of Lost Things

The thing most people misunderstood about Aldous Crane's establishment was that it did not sell lost property. Lost property has an owner who is looking for it. What Crane auctioned, three evenings a week in a narrow hall off a street that maps were oddly reluctant to name, were objects that no one was looking for at all — things so thoroughly lost that the losing itself had been forgotten, so that not one soul in the world could have told you they were gone.

No one knew where the objects came from. That was the first rule of the place, the rule Crane had inherited along with the gavel and the long mahogany rostrum and the lease that renewed itself, when he thought about it, with a regularity he had never quite arranged. They simply arrived. He would come down in the grey of a morning and find them waiting in the intake room at the back — a child's mitten, a wedding ring worn thin, a single brass spectacle lens, a music box that played four notes and then stopped as though remembering it shouldn't — arranged on the long table as if set down by someone who had left a moment before, though the door was bolted from the inside and had been all night. He catalogued them. He gave them lot numbers. And three evenings a week he sold them to the people who came.

For people came. That was the second strange thing, and the one that had stopped frightening him only after many years. They were not collectors. They came in ones and twos, often having no idea why they had come, drawn down the unnameable street by something they could not have described, and they would sit in the dim hall while Crane lifted each lot to the lamp and described it in his low, even voice, and then — every so often, unpredictably — one of them would go very still. Their hand would rise as if it belonged to someone else. They would bid, white-knuckled, far beyond sense, for a chipped thimble or a faded ribbon, and when the gavel fell they would clutch the thing to their chest and weep as though they had got back something they had not known, until that exact instant, that they had ever lost. Crane had watched a grown man sob over a tin whistle. He had learned not to ask. The transaction was never really about money. The money was simply the toll you paid to remember.