Day 1 - Anisha Kelly

Anisha Kelly stepped to the very edge of Bond Street and waved for a hansom cab. It was half past four, and she was supposed to record minutes for the Women’s Franchise League meeting at five sharp.

A rusty horse and cab rattled up. As the harness clanked in the driver’s hands, a glassy shimmer fell from nowhere, a thin curtain of mist. For an instant, the jostling crowd in the street refracted behind the shimmer, then shattered into darkness.

Anisha was knocked on her back, lungs squeezed as if between clapped cymbals. Screams and curses filled her ears. The shouts had an odd muffled quality as if a wool blanket had been thrown over London.

She scrambled onto hands and knees, patting about in obscurity for her beaded reticule. Instead of pavement under her fingers, there was a rough woven texture, like hemp carpeting. It smelled as sour as dirty stockings.

“I’ll be late,” Anisha said, to no one in particular. So this was it; run over by a cab and exiled into mildewed eternity.

The sun came out–brutal and final. Anisha brushed down her skirt and climbed to her feet. It wasn’t the sun at all. Above her, white glass tubes flickered uncertainly. They illuminated a vast hall with low ceilings made of a spongy material, like flattened coral.

The voices went silent for five seconds, then soared to outrage again.

Anisha stood in the middle of a bazaar: the hall was subdivided into aisles lined with stalls hawking articles, everything from illustrations wreathed in glassy oilpaper, to ceramic knickknacks of gargoyles and doe-eyed fairies. The hawkers and customers alike argued with each other. Frantic urgency burred through the stale air.

Anisha made one full circle, eyes on the floor. Her beaded reticule, which held a pillbox, two pounds in sundry change, and a gold pocket watch from her grandfather, was nowhere to be seen. Dead or not, Anisha wanted it found.

“I’ve been robbed!” she said.

Her voice joined a chorus of complaints. Other sellers were saying the same thing. Three separate cash boxes had been emptied in the minute-long blackout.

“I would have had everything under glass if I knew we were going to have power outages every fifteen minutes.” A man opposite Anisha gestured in a hollow manner at his table. Strange dice, glossy and multi-faceted, piled like jewels in a compartment grid. Like everyone else in the room, his clothes were odd and embarrassingly sparse: a black shirt, striped swimming drawers, and soft shoes constructed out of something akin to a fishnet. He wore a pair of tinted eyeglasses on his head.

His gaze lit on Anisha and he grinned. “Emma? Lizzy? Or not Jane Austen at all?”

“Pardon?” Anisha felt stunned by the sheer whiteness and precision of his teeth.

“Wait–Emily Bronte? Wuthering Heights? My ex was into the kinky classics.”

Anisha held the private belief that the reason women were about fifteen years behind in attaining suffrage was the collective wastage of hours spent reading frivolous novels. The classics were the Iliad and the Odyssey, not Jane Austen. “Sir, may you please direct me toward the local constabulary?” At his blank expression, she added, “Police.”

“Wow, that’s a little preemptive, don’t you think?” A short man with cropped hair and a pinched face marched up to Anisha and the fishnet man. He waved a clipboard. “Look, a little blackout like that, and we’d expect to find some things missing, right?”

“Who are you?” Anisha asked.

“Rivers. What’d you lose? Write it on the clipboard. Right here. We’re collecting a list so we can check Saturn’s lost and found later. Lost item, phone number.”

Anisha did not accept the clipboard nor the red pen waved in her face. “Not missing. Stolen.”

Rivers rolled his eyes. “Come on, we don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill here. We’ll check around. You get what you lost, and no harm no foul.”

“I think Emily Bronte here may be right,” the fishnet man said. He held out a small slip of paper. He read it aloud, and Anisha stood beside him.

In pristine copperplate script ran the words, “Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the cashboxes are restocked.”

Arsène Lupin. It rang vague bells. Anisha’s younger brother always had his nose stuck in a mortifying penny dreadful. The cover of the Lupin periodicals bore an illustration of a silhouetted man scampering along a bridge.

“Who’s that?” Rivers growled.

“It stated who he is,” Anisha said. “Gentleman burglar.”

The fishnet man waved the slip. “Hey, Rivers. Who’s responsible for electrical?”

“I think that would be Mac Guffin. He’s on lunch break right now. Why?”

Anisha and the fishnet man exchanged a tired glance over Rivers’ balding head. A passion for efficiency could make a person shockingly dense.

“Can you tell us where his office is?” Anisha said in as gentle a voice as she could manage.

“Saturn 143b. I think. I’m not exactly sure. Look, do you want to put down your lost items or not?”

They declined, and Rivers bustled on down the aisle to the next set of stalls.

“We can at least go visit,” the fishnet man said. “See if he has any bags of cash stuck in the breaker box. I’m Glen, by the way.”

“Anisha Kelly.”

They shook hands. Glen put a neighboring seller in charge of his table, and the two set off through the bazaar.

Anisha Kelly from Outfauxed by Corrie Peters, Historical Mystery

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