Elena laughs and one of the other librarians shushes her. Zachary gives her a wave as he leaves, relishing the librarian-on-librarian shushing.
Outside in the snow everything is crystal clear and too bright. Zachary heads back to his dorm, turning over in his mind the possibilities of what might have happened to the vanished book and not settling on anything.
He is relieved that he kept Sweet Sorrows in his bag today.
As he walks he thinks of something he hasn’t tried yet and feels rather stupid about it. When he gets back to his room he drops his bag on the floor and heads straight for his computer.
He googles “Sweet Sorrows” first even though he expects what he gets: pages upon pages of Shakespeare quotes and bands and articles about sugar consumption. He searches for bees and keys and swords. The results are a mix of Arthurian legends and lists of items from Resident Evil. He attempts various combinations and finds a bee and a key on the coat of arms of a fictional magic school. He notes the name of the book and the author, curious as to whether or not the symbology is coincidental.
At several points in Sweet Sorrows the place is referred to as the Harbor on the Starless Sea, but a search for “Starless Sea” turns up little more than a Dungeon Crawl Classic that sounds appropriate but unrelated and Google suggests that perhaps he meant Sunless Sea either in reference to an upcoming video game or as a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem.
Zachary sighs. He tries image searches and scrolls through page after page of cartoons and skeletons and dungeon masters and then something catches his eye.
He clicks the image to enlarge it.
The black-and-white photograph looks candid and not posed, maybe even cropped from a larger image. A woman in a mask, her head turned away from the camera, leaning in to listen to the man standing next to her who is also masked and wearing a tuxedo. There are several indistinguishable people around them, it looks like it might have been taken at a party.
Around the woman’s neck is a series of three layered chains with a charm hanging from each one.
Zachary clicks the image again to view it full-size.
Hanging from the top chain is a bee.
Below it is a key.
Below the key is a sword.
Zachary clicks again to view the page the image came from, a post on a pinboard site asking if anyone knows where to buy the necklace.
But beneath that there is a source link for the photo.
Zachary clicks the link with a hand over his mouth and finds himself staring at a photo gallery.
Algonquin Hotel Annual Literary Masquerade, 2014.
Another click informs him that this year’s event is three days away.
There is a door in a forest that was not always a forest.
The door is no longer a door, not entirely. The structure that held it collapsed some time ago and the door fell along with it and now lies on the ground rather than standing upright.
The wood that composed it has rotted. Its hinges have rusted. Someone took its doorknob away.
The door remembers the time when it was complete. When there was a house with a roof and walls and other doors and people inside. There are leaves and birds and trees now but no people. Not for years and years.
So the girl comes as a surprise.
She is a small girl, too small to be wandering in the woods alone.
But she is not lost.
A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way.
This girl in the woods is not lost. She is exploring.
This girl is not scared. She is not unnerved by the darkness of the clawing shadows cast by the trees in the late-afternoon sun. She is not bothered by the thorns and branches that tug at her clothes and scratch at her skin.
She is young enough to carry fear with her without letting it into her heart. Without being scared. She wears her fear lightly, like a veil, aware that there are dangers but letting the crackling awareness hover around her. It does not sink in, it buzzes in excitement like a swarm of invisible bees.
The girl has been told many times not to wander too far into these woods. Warned not to play in them at all and she resents her explorations being dismissed as “play.”
Today she has gone so far into the woods that she wonders if she has started going out of them again toward the other side. She is not concerned about finding her way back. She remembers spaces, they stick in her mind even when they are expansive ones filled with trees and rocks. Once she closed her eyes and spun around to prove to herself that she could pick the right direction when she opened them again and she was only wrong by a little bit and a little bit wrong is mostly right.
Today she finds rocks that might once have been a wall, clustered in a line. Those that are piled on each other do not reach very high, even in the highest places it would be easy to climb over them, but the girl picks a medium-high spot to tackle instead.
On the other side of the wall there are clinging vines that snake over the ground, making it difficult to walk so the girl explores closer to the wall instead. It is a more interesting spot than others she has found in the woods. Were the girl older she might recognize that there was once a structure here but she is not old enough to put the pieces of crumbling rock together in her mind and assemble them into a long-forgotten building. The hinge of the door stays buried beneath years of leaves near her left shoe. A candlestick hides between rocks and the shadows fall in such a way that even this intrepid explorer does not discover it.
It is getting dark, though enough of the now golden sun remains to light her way home if she climbs back over the wall and retraces her steps, but she does not. She is distracted by something on the ground.
Away from the wall there is another line of stones, set in an almost-circle. A most-of-an-oval shape. A fallen archway that might once have contained a door.
The girl picks up a stick and uses it to dig around the leaves in the middle of the arch of stones. The leaves crumble and break and reveal something round and metal.
She pushes more of the leaves out of the way with the stick and uncovers a curling ring about the size of her hand, which might once have been brass but has tarnished in mossy patterns of green and brown.
One side is attached to another piece of metal that remains buried.
The girl has only ever seen pictures of door knockers but she thinks this might be one even though most of the ones she has seen have lions biting the metal rings and this ring does not, unless the lion is hiding in the dirt.
She has always wanted to use a door knocker to knock upon a door and this one is on the ground and not in a picture.
This one she can reach.
She wraps her fingers around it, not caring how dirty they become in the process, and lifts it up. It is heavy.
She lets the knocker drop again. The result is a satisfying clang of metal on metal that echoes through the trees.
The door is delighted to be knocked upon after so long.
And the door—though it is mere pieces of what it once was—remembers where it used to lead. It remembers how to open.
So now, when a small explorer knocks, the remains of this door to the Starless Sea let her in.
The earth crumbles beneath her, pulling her into the ground feetfirst in a cascade of dirt and rocks and leaves.
The girl is too surprised to scream.
She is not afraid. She does not understand what is happening so her fear only buzzes excitedly around her as she falls.
When she lands she is all curiosity and scraped elbows and dirt-covered eyelashes. The lion-less door knocker rests bent and broken by her side.
The door is destroyed in the fall, too damaged to remember what it once was.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits on a train bound for Manhattan, staring out the window at the frozen tundra of New England, and begins, not for the first time today, to question his life choices.
It is too conveniently timed a coincidence not to pursue, even for a tenuous, jewelry-based connection. He spent a day getting himself organized, procuring a rather expensive ticket to the party and an even more expensive hotel room across the street from the Algonquin which was completely booked. The ticket details included the dress code: formal, literary costumes encouraged, masks required.
Far too much time was wasted worrying over where to find a mask until he thought to text Kat. She had six of them, several involving feathers, but the one packed in his duffel bag with his carefully rolled suit is of the Zorro variety, black silk and surprisingly comfortable. (“I was the man in black from The Princess Bride for Halloween last year,” Kat explained. “That’s literary! Do you want my poufy black shirt, too?”)
Zachary wonders if he should have left yesterday, as there is only one train per day and this one is supposed to get him to New York with a couple of hours to spare, but it is stopping frequently due to the weather.
He takes off his watch and shoves it in his pocket after glancing at it four times in the space of three minutes.
He is not sure why he is so anxious.
He is not entirely certain what he is going to do when he gets to the party.
He doesn’t even really know what the woman in the photograph looks like. There’s no way of knowing whether she will be there this year.
But it’s the only bread crumb he has to follow.
Zachary takes his phone out of his coat and pulls up the copy of the photo he has saved and stares at it again even though he has already committed it to memory down to the disembodied hand in the corner holding a glass of sparkling wine.
The woman in the photo has her head turned to the side and her profile is mostly mask, but her body is facing the camera, the layered necklace with its golden bee and key and sword as clear and bright as stars against her black gown. The gown is slinky, the woman wearing it curvy and either tall or wearing very high heels, everything below her knees is obscured by a potted palm conspiring with her dress to pull her into the shadows. Her hair above the mask is dark and swept up in one of those styles that looks effortless but probably involves a great deal of construction. She could be twenty or forty or anywhere in between. For that matter the photo looks as though it could have been taken that many years ago, everything within the frame looks timeless.
The man at the woman’s side wears a tuxedo, his arm is raised in a way that suggests his hand is resting on her arm but her shoulder conceals the rest of his sleeve. The ribbon of a mask is visible against his slightly greying hair but his face is completely obscured by her own. A sliver of neck and ear reveal that his complexion is much deeper than hers but little else. Zachary turns the phone in his hand trying to get a look at the man’s face, momentarily oblivious to the futility of the action.
The train slows to a halt.
Zachary looks around. The train car is less than half full. Mostly solo passengers, each having claimed their own pair of seats. A group of four at the other end of the car is chatting, sometimes loudly, and Zachary regrets not bringing his headphones. The girl across from him has huge ones, between the headphones and her hoodie she’s almost completely obscured, facing the window and probably asleep.
A static-punctuated announcement comes over the speaker, a variation on the one that has been relayed three times before. Stopped due to ice on the tracks. Waiting for it to be cleared. We apologize for the delay and will be moving again as soon as possible etcetera etcetera.
“Excuse me,” a voice says. Zachary looks up. The middle-aged woman sitting in front of him has turned around over the high back of her seat to face him. “Do you happen to have a pen?” she asks. She wears several looping layers of colorful beaded necklaces and they jingle as she talks.
“I think so,” Zachary says. He rummages around in his satchel and comes up first with a mechanical pencil but then tries again and finds one of the gel rollers that seem to procreate at the bottom of his bag. “Here you go,” he says, handing it to the woman.
“Thank you, I’ll just be a minute,” the woman says and she jingles back out of sight behind her seat.
The train begins to move and travels enough that the snow and trees outside the windows are replaced by different snow and different trees before it slows to a stop again.
Zachary takes The Little Stranger out of his bag and starts to read, trying to forget where he is and who he is and what he’s doing for a little while.
The announcement that they have reached Manhattan comes as a surprise, pulling Zachary from his reading.
The other occupants are already gathering their luggage. The girl with the headphones is gone.
“Thank you for this,” the woman in front of him says as he slings his satchel over his shoulder and picks up his duffel bag. She gives him back his pen. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“You’re welcome,” Zachary says, putting the pen back in his bag. He falls into line with the passengers impatiently making their way off the train.
Exiting onto the street from Penn Station is overwhelming and disorienting, but Zachary has always found Manhattan to be disorienting and overwhelming in general. So much energy and people and stuff in such a small footprint. There is less snow here, clumped in gutters in miniature mountains of grey ice.
He reaches Forty-Fourth Street with two hours left before the party. The Algonquin appears quiet but it is difficult to tell from the outside. He nearly misses the entrance to his own hotel across the street and then wanders through a sunken lobby lounge and past a glass-walled fireplace before locating the front desk. He checks in without incident, flinching as he hands over his credit card even though he has more than enough to cover the total from years upon years of large birthday checks sent in lieu of visits from his father. The desk clerk promises to send a clothes steamer up to his room so he can attempt to undo whatever damage his bag has unleashed on his suit.
The windowless upstairs hallways are submarine-like. His room is more mirrored than any hotel room he has ever stayed in before. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors across from the bed and on both walls in the bathroom make the small space seem larger but they also make him feel as though he’s not alone.
The steamer arrives, dropped off by a bellhop who he forgets to tip but it’s too early to prep his suit so Zachary distracts himself with the gigantic round bathtub, even though the mirror-bathtub Zacharys are disturbing. Bathtub opportunities are few and far between. His dorm has a less-than-private row of showers and the claw-foot tub at his mother’s Hudson River Valley farmhouse always looks appealing but refuses to keep water warm for longer than seven minutes at a time. There is, strangely, a single taper candle in the bathroom complete with a box of matches, which is an interesting touch. Zachary lights it and the one flame becomes many within the mirrors.
Somewhere mid-bath he admits to himself that if this excursion proves unsuccessful he will give up on the entire endeavor. Return Sweet Sorrows to the library and try to forget about it and turn his attention back to his thesis. Maybe visit his mom on his way back to school for an aura cleansing and a bottle of wine.
Maybe his story began and ended that day in that alleyway. Maybe his story is about missed opportunities that cannot be recaptured.
He closes his eyes, blocking out the mirror Zacharys.
He sees those two words again in their serifed typeface.
Not yet.
He wonders why he believes it because someone wrote it down in a book. Why he believes anything at all and where to draw mental lines, where to stop suspending his disbelief. Does he believe that the boy in the
book is him? Well, yes. Does he believe painted doors on walls can open as though they were real and lead to other places entirely?
He sighs and sinks below the surface, remaining under until he has to return for oxygen-related reasons.
Zachary gets out of the tub before the water has cooled, a decadent bathtub miracle. The fluffy hotel robe makes him think he should stay in fancy hotels more often and then he remembers how much this single night cost him and decides to enjoy it while he can and avoid the minibar.
A muffled ding from his bag signals a text message: a photo from Kat of a half-finished blue-and-bronze-striped scarf with accompanying text that reads almost done!
He texts back Looks great! Thanks again, see you soon and starts steaming his suit. It doesn’t take much time though his shirt proves to be a bigger problem and he gives up after a few passes, figuring he’ll leave his jacket or his vest on for the entire evening so the back of the shirt can remain unpresentable.
Mirror Zachary looks downright dashing and regular Zachary wonders if the lighting and the mirrors are in an attractiveness conspiracy with each other. He forgets what he looks like without his glasses, he so rarely wears his contact lenses.
It’s not a specifically literary costume, but even without the mask he feels like a character in his black suit with its near-invisible pinstripes. He bought the suit two years ago and hasn’t worn it much but it’s well-tailored and fits properly. It looks better now, paired with a charcoal shirt instead of the white one he’s worn it with before.
He leaves his hat and gloves and scarf, considering he’s only going across the street, and keeps his mask in his pocket along with a printout of his ticket even though it implied he could give his name at the door. He brings his wallet but leaves his phone, not wanting to take his everyday world along.
Zachary takes Sweet Sorrows from his bag and puts it in the pocket of his coat and then switches it to the inside pocket of his suit jacket where it is just small enough to fit. Perhaps the book will act like some sort of beacon and draw whatever or whoever it is he’s looking for to him.
The Starless Sea Page 6
