He doesn’t understand. Not only how someone could have captured the scene in such detail but how it is here in a book that looks much older than he is. He rubs the paper between his fingers and it feels heavy and rough, yellowing to near brown around the edges.
Could someone have predicted him, down to his shoelaces? Does that mean the rest of it could be true? That somewhere there are tongueless acolytes in a subterranean library? It doesn’t seem fair to him to be the solitary real person in a collection of fictional characters, though he supposes the pirate and the girl could be real. Still, the very idea is so ludicrous that he laughs at himself.
He wonders if he is losing his mind and then decides that if he is able to wonder about it he probably isn’t, which isn’t particularly comforting.
He looks down at the last two words on the page.
Not yet.
Those two words swim through a thousand questions flooding his mind.
Then one of those questions floats to the surface of his thoughts, prompted by the repeated bee motif and his remembered door.
Is this book from that place?
He inspects the book again, pausing at the barcode stuck to the back cover.
Zachary looks closer, and sees that the sticker is obscuring something written or printed there. A spot of black ink peeks out from the bottom of the sticker.
He feels mildly guilty about prying it off. The barcode was faulty, anyway, and likely needs to be replaced. Not that he has any intention of returning the book, not now. He peels the sticker off slowly and carefully, trying to remove it in one piece and attempting not to rip the paper below it. It comes off easily and he sticks it to the edge of his desk before turning back to what is written below it.
There are no words, only a string of symbols that have been stamped or otherwise inscribed onto the back cover, faded and smudged but easily identifiable.
The exposed dot of ink is the hilt of a sword.
Above it is a key.
Above the key is a bee.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins stares at the miniature versions of the same symbols he once contemplated in an alleyway behind his mother’s store and wonders how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn’t know he was in.
It began as a dollhouse.
A miniature habitat carefully constructed from wood and glue and paint. Meticulously crafted to re-create a full-size dwelling in the most exquisite level of detail. When it was built it was gifted to and played with by children, illustrating daily happenings in simplified exaggerations.
There are dolls. A family with a mother and father and son and daughter and small dog. They wear delicate cloth replicas of suits and dresses. The dog has real fur.
There is a kitchen and a parlor and a sunroom. Bedrooms and stairs and an attic. Each room is filled with furniture and decorated with miniature paintings and minuscule vases of flowers. The wallpaper is printed with intricate patterns. The tiny books can be removed from the shelves.
It has a roof with wooden shingles each no bigger than a fingernail. Diminutive doors that close and latch. The house opens with a lock and key and expands, though most often it is kept closed. The doll life inside visible only through the windows.
The dollhouse sits in a room in this Harbor on the Starless Sea. The history of it is missing. The children who once played with it long grown and gone. The tale of how it came to be placed in an obscure room in an obscure place is forgotten.
It is not remarkable.
What is remarkable is what has evolved around it.
What is a single house, after all, with nothing surrounding it? Without a yard for the dog. Without a complaining neighbor across the street, without a street to have neighbors on at all? Without trees and horses and stores. Without a harbor. A boat. A city across the sea.
All this has built up around it. One child’s invented world has become another’s, and another’s, and so on until it is everyone’s world. Embellished and expanded with metal and paper and glue. Gears and found objects and clay. More houses have been constructed. More dolls have been added. Stacks of books arranged by color serve as landscape. Folded-paper birds fly overhead. Hot air balloons descend from above.
There are mountains and villages and cities, castles and dragons and floating ballrooms. Farms with barns and fluffy cotton sheep. A working clock of a reincarnated watch keeps time atop a tower. There is a park with a lake and ducks. A beach with a lighthouse.
The world cascades around the room. There are paths for visitors to walk on, to access the corners. There is the outline of what was once a desk beneath the buildings. There are shelves on the walls that are now distant countries across an ocean with carefully rippled blue paper waves.
It began as a dollhouse. Over time, it has become more than that.
A dolltown. A dollworld. A dolluniverse.
Constantly expanding.
Almost everyone who finds the room feels compelled to add to it. To leave the contents of their pockets repurposed as a wall or tree or temple. A thimble becomes a trash can. Used matchsticks create a fence. Loose buttons transform into wheels or apples or stars.
They add houses made from broken books or rainstorms conjured from glass glitter. They move a figure or a landmark. They escort the tiny sheep from one pasture to another. They reorient the mountains.
Some visitors play in the room for hours, creating stories and narratives. Others look around, adjust a crooked tree or door, and depart. Or they simply move the ducks around the lake and are satisfied with that.
Anyone who enters the room affects it. Leaves an impression upon it even if it is unintentional. Quietly opening the door lets a soft draft rustle over the objects inside. A tree might topple. A doll might lose its hat. An entire building might crumble.
An ill-placed step might crush the hardware store. A sleeve could catch on the top of a castle, sending a princess tumbling to the ground below. It is a fragile place.
Any damage is usually temporary. Someone will come along and provide repairs. Restore a fallen princess to her battlement. Rebuild the hardware store with sticks and cardboard. Create new stories upon the old ones.
The original house in the center changes in subtler ways. The furniture moves from room to room. The walls are painted or papered over. The mother and father dolls spend time separately in other structures with other dolls. The daughter and son leave and return and leave again. The dog chases cars and sheep and dares to bark at the dragon.
Around them, the world grows ever larger.
It sometimes takes the dolls quite a while to adapt.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits on the floor of his closet with the door closed, surrounded by a forest of hanging shirts and coats, his back up against where the door to Narnia would be if his closet were a wardrobe, having something of an existential crisis.
He has read Sweet Sorrows in its entirety and read it again and thought perhaps he should not read it a third time but read it a third time anyway because he could not sleep.
He still cannot sleep.
Now it is three a.m. and Zachary is in the back of his closet, a version of his favorite reading spot when he was a child. A comfort he has not returned to in years and never in this closet, which is ill-suited for such sitting.
He sat in his childhood closet after he found the door, he remembers that now. It was a better closet for sitting. A deeper one, with pillows he had dragged in to make it more comfortable. That one didn’t have a door to Narnia, either, he knows because he checked.
Only the singular section of Sweet Sorrows is about him, though there are pages missing. The text comes back to the pirate and the girl again but the rest is disjointed, it feels incomplete. Much of it revolves around an underground library. No, not a library, a book-centric fantasia that Zachary missed his invitation to because he d
idn’t open a painted door when he was eleven.
Apparently he went around looking for the wrong imaginary entryways.
The wine-colored book rests at the foot of the bed. Zachary will not admit to himself that he is hiding from it, in the closet where it cannot see him.
A whole book and he has no idea even after reading it three times how he should proceed.
The rest of the book doesn’t feel as tangible as those few pages near the beginning. Zachary has always had a complicated view of magic because of his mother, but while he can grasp herbalism and divination the things in the book are very much beyond his definition of real. Magic magic.
But if those few pages about him are real, the rest could be…
Zachary puts his head between his knees and tries to keep his breathing steady.
He keeps wondering who wrote it. Who saw him in that alleyway with the door and why they wrote it down. The opening pages imply that the first stories are nested: the pirate telling the story about the acolyte, the acolyte seeing the story about the boy. Him.
But if he’s in a story within a story who is telling it? Someone must have typeset it and bound it in a book.
Someone somewhere knows this story.
He wonders if someone somewhere knows he’s sitting on the floor of his closet.
Zachary crawls out into his room, his legs stiff. It is near dawn, the light outside his window a lighter shade of dark. He decides to take a walk. He leaves the book on the bed. His fingers start twitching immediately, wanting to take it with him so he can read it again. He wraps his scarf around his neck. Reading a book four times in one day is perfectly normal behavior. He buttons his wool coat. Having a physical response to a lack of book is not unusual. He tugs his knit hat down over his ears. Everyone spends nights on the floor of their closet during grad school. He pulls on his boots. Finding an incident from your childhood in an authorless mystery book is an everyday occurrence. He slips his hands into his gloves. Happens to everyone.
He puts the book in the pocket of his coat.
Zachary trudges through newly fallen snow without a destination in mind. He passes the library and continues toward a hilly stretch of campus near the undergraduate dorms. He could adjust his route to pass his old dorm but he does not, he always finds it strange to look at a window he used to look out from the other side. He works his way through the crisp unbroken snow, crushing the pristine surface under his boots.
He usually enjoys the winter and the snow and the cold even when he can’t feel his toes. There’s a wonder to it, left over from reading about snow in books before he got to experience it for himself. His first snow was a laughter-filled night spent in the field outside his mother’s farmhouse, making snowballs with his bare hands and constantly losing his footing in shoes he discovered after the fact were not waterproof. Inside their cashmere-lined gloves, his hands tingle thinking about it.
He is always surprised how quiet the snow is, until it melts.
“Rawlins!” a voice calls from behind him and Zachary turns. A bundled figure with a striped hat waves a brightly mittened hand at him and he watches the mismatched color move over a field of white as it trudges up the hill through the snow, sometimes hopping in the foot holes he has left. When the figure is a few yards away he recognizes Kat, one of the few undergrads from his department who has moved from acquaintance to almost-friend, mostly because she took it upon herself to get to know everyone and he has been Kat-approved. She runs a video-game-themed cooking blog and tends to try out her often delicious experiments on the rest of them. Skyrim-inspired sweet rolls and classic BioShock cream-filled cakes and maraschino truffle odes to Pac-Man cherries. Zachary suspects she doesn’t sleep and she has a tendency to appear out of thin air to suggest cocktails or dancing or some other excuse to coerce him out of his room, and while Zachary has never articulated the fact that he is grateful to have someone like her in his otherwise highly introverted lifestyle he is pretty sure she already knows.
“Hey, Kat,” Zachary says when she reaches him, hoping he won’t appear as off-kilter as he feels. “What brings you out so early?”
Kat sighs and rolls her eyes. The sigh drifts away as a cloud in the frigid air.
“God-awful early is the only hour I can get lab time for as-of-yet unofficial projects, how ’bout you?” Kat shifts her bag on her shoulder and nearly loses her balance, Zachary puts a hand out to steady her but she recovers on her own.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Zachary answers, which is true enough. “Are you still working on that scent-based project?”
“I am!” Kat’s cheeks betray the smile hidden by her scarf. “I think it’s the key to immersive experience, virtual reality isn’t all that real if it doesn’t smell like anything. I can’t figure out how to get it to work for in-home use yet but my site-specific stuff is going well. I’m probably going to need beta testers in the spring if you’d be willing.”
“If spring ever shows up, I’m game.” Kat’s projects are legendary throughout the department, elaborate interactive installations, and always memorable regardless of how successful she deems them. They make Zachary’s work feel overly cerebral and sedentary by comparison, especially since so much of his own work is analyzing work already done by others.
“Excellent!” Kat says. “I’ll put you on my list. And I’m glad I ran into you, are you busy tonight?”
“Not really,” Zachary says, having not thought about the fact that the day would go on, that the campus would continue in its routines and he is the only one who has had his universe turned askew.
“Could you help me run my J-term class?” Kat asks. “Seven to eight thirty or so?”
“Your Harry Potter knitting class? I’m not a very good knitter.”
“No, that’s on Tuesdays, this one is a salon-style discussion called Innovation in Storytelling and this week’s topic is gaming. I’m trying to have a guest co-moderator for each class and Noriko was supposed to do this one but she bailed on me to go skiing. It’ll be super chill, no lecturing or anything you need to prepare, just babbling about gaming in a relaxed yet intellectual setting. I know that’s your jam, Rawlins. Please?”
The impulse to say no that Zachary has for pretty much anything that involves talking to people arises automatically, but as Kat bounces on her heels to keep warm and he considers the proposal, it sounds like a good way to get out of his head and away from the book for a little while. This is what Kat does, after all. It is good to have a Kat.
“Sure, why not,” he says. Kat whoops. The whoop echoes over the snow-covered lawn, prompting a pair of disgruntled crows to abandon their perch in a nearby tree.
“You’re awesome,” Kat says. “I’ll knit you a Ravenclaw scarf as a thank-you.”
“How did you know—”
“Please, you’re so obviously Ravenclaw. See you tonight, we meet in the lounge in Scott Hall, the one in the back on the right. I’ll text you details when my hands thaw. You’re the best. I’d hug you but I think I’d fall down.”
“Sentiment appreciated,” Zachary assures her and he considers, here in the snow, asking if Kat has ever heard of something called the Starless Sea, because if anyone would have heard of a possibly fairy-tale, possibly mythical location it would be Kat, but articulating it aloud would make it too real and instead he watches as she trudges off toward the science quad where the Emerging Media Center is housed, though he realizes she might very well be headed to the chemistry labs instead.
Zachary stands alone in the snow, overlooking the slowly waking campus.
Yesterday it felt like it always does, like almost not quite home. Today he feels like an impostor. He breathes in deeply, the pine-scented air filling his lungs.
Two black dots mar the pale blue of the cloudless sky, the crows that took flight moments ago in the process of disappearing into the distance.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins commences the long walk back to his room.
Once he has kicked off his boots and peeled off his winter layers, Zachary takes out the book. He turns it over in his hands and then puts it down on his desk. It doesn’t look like anything special, like it contains an entire world, though the same could be said of any book.
Zachary pulls his curtains shut and is half asleep before they settle over the window, blocking out the sun-brightened snowscape and the figure watching him from across the street in the shadow of an unruly spruce.
Zachary wakes hours later when his phone chirps a text alert at him, the vibration rattling it enough that it falls off the desk and onto the floor, landing softly on a discarded sock.
7pm scott hall first floor lounge—from the front entrance go past the stairs & turn right down the hall, it’s behind the french doors & looks like the postapocalyptic version of a room where fancy ladies have tea. i’ll be there early. you’re the best. <3 k.
The clock on the phone informs him that it is already 5:50 and Scott Hall is clear across campus. Zachary yawns and drags himself out of bed and down the hall to take a shower.
Standing in the steam, he thinks he dreamed the book but the relief that this thought brings slowly dissipates and he remembers the truth.
He scrubs his skin near raw with the homemade almond oil and sugar mixture his mother gifts him every winter, this year’s batch is scented with vetiver to promote emotional calm. Maybe he can scrub off that boy standing in that alleyway. Maybe the real Zachary is under there somewhere.
Every seven years each cell in your body has changed, he reminds himself. He is not that boy anymore. He is twice removed from that boy.
Zachary spends so long in the shower that he has to rush to get ready, grabbing a protein bar when he realizes he hasn’t eaten all day. He tosses a notebook in his satchel and his hand hovers over Sweet Sorrows before grabbing The Little Stranger instead.
He is halfway out the door when he doubles back to put Sweet Sorrows in his bag as well.
The Starless Sea Page 3
