The door closes behind them, muffling the party chatter and cutting off the light.
Someone else is in the darkness with him, the hand that pulled him in has released him but someone is standing close by. Taller, maybe. Breathing softly. Smelling of lemon and leather and something that Zachary can’t identify but finds extremely appealing.
Then a voice whispers in his ear.
“Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate.”
A male voice. The tone deep but the cadence light, a storyteller voice. Zachary freezes, waiting. Listening.
“This, as you might imagine, proved problematic,” the voice continues. “Their romance disrupted the flow of time. It tangled the strings of fortune into knots.”
A hand on his back pushes him gently forward and Zachary takes a tentative step into the darkness, and then another. The storyteller continues, the volume of his voice now loud enough to fill the space.
“The stars watched from the heavens nervously, worrying what might occur. What might happen to the days and nights were Time to suffer a broken heart? What catastrophes might result if the same fate awaited Fate itself?”
They continue walking down a dark hall.
“The stars conspired and separated the two. For a while they breathed easier in the heavens. Time continued to flow as it always had, or perhaps imperceptibly slower. Fate wove together the paths that were meant to intertwine, though perhaps a string was missed here and there.”
Now a turn, as Zachary is guided in a different direction through the darkness. In the pause he can hear the band and the party, the sound muffled and distant.
“But eventually,” the storyteller continues, “Fate and Time found each other again.”
A firm hand on Zachary’s shoulder halts their movement. The storyteller leans closer.
“In the heavens, the stars sighed, twinkling and fretting. They asked the moon her advice. The moon in turn called upon the parliament of owls to decide how best to proceed.”
Somewhere in the darkness the sound of wings beating, close and heavy, moving the air around them.
“The parliament of owls convened and discussed the matter amongst themselves night after night. They argued and debated while the world slept around them, and the world continued to turn, unaware that such important matters were under discussion while it slumbered.”
In the darkness a hand guides Zachary’s own to a doorknob. Zachary turns it and the door opens. In front of him he thinks he sees a sliver of a crescent moon and then it vanishes.
“The parliament of owls came to the logical conclusion that if the problem was in the combination, one of the elements should be removed. They chose to keep the one they felt more important.”
A hand pushes Zachary forward. A door closes behind him. He wonders if he has been left alone but then the story continues, the voice moving around him in the darkness.
“The parliament of owls told their decision to the stars and the stars agreed. The moon did not, but on this night she was dark and could not offer her opinion.”
Here Zachary remembers, vividly, the moon disappearing in front of his eyes a moment before as the story continues.
“So it was decided, and Fate was pulled apart. Ripped into pieces by beaks and claws. Fate’s screams echoed through the deepest corners and the highest heavens but no one dared to intervene save for a small brave mouse who snuck into the fray, creeping unnoticed through the blood and bone and feathers, and took Fate’s heart and kept it safe.”
Now a mouselike movement scurries up Zachary’s arm and over his shoulder. He shivers. The movement stops over his heart and the weight of a hand rests there a moment before lifting again. A long pause follows.
“When the furor died down there was nothing else left of Fate.”
A gloved hand settles over Zachary’s eyes, the darkness grows warmer and darker, the voice closer now.
“The owl who consumed Fate’s eyes gained great sight, greater sight than any that had been granted to a mortal creature before. The parliament crowned him the Owl King.”
The hand remains over Zachary’s eyes but another rests briefly on the top of his head, a momentary weight.
“In the heavens the stars sparkled with relief but the moon was full of sorrow.”
Another pause here. A long one, and in the silence Zachary can hear his breathing along with the storyteller’s. The hand does not leave his eyes. The scent of leather mingles with lemon and tobacco and sweat. He is beginning to get nervous when the story continues.
“And so Time goes on as it should and events that were once fated to happen are left instead to chance, and Chance never falls in love with anything for long.”
The storyteller guides Zachary to the right, moving him forward again.
“But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.”
Here they stop.
“Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again.”
The sound of a door opening in front of him, and Zachary is guided forward again.
“And Time is always waiting,” the voice whispers, a warm breath against Zachary’s neck.
The hand that had been covering Zachary’s eyes lifts and a door clicks shut behind him. Blinking against the light, his heart pounding in his ears, he looks around to find himself back in the hotel lobby, in a corner half hidden by a potted palm.
The door behind him is locked.
Something hits his ankle and he looks down to find a fluffy grey-and-white cat rubbing its head against his leg.
He reaches down to pet it and only then does Zachary realize that his hands are shaking. The cat does not appear to mind. She stays with him for a moment and then walks off into the shadows.
Zachary heads back to the bar, still deep in story daze. He tries to remember if he has heard this particular tale before but he cannot despite the fact that it feels familiar, like a myth he read somewhere and subsequently forgot. The bartender mixes him another Drowning Ophelia but apologizes as they’ve run out of the fennel syrup. He has substituted honey and added a prosecco float. It’s better with the honey.
Zachary looks around for the woman dressed as Max but he cannot find her.
He sits at the bar, feeling like a failure and yet overwhelmed by all that has happened as he attempts to catalogue the entire evening. Drank rosemary for remembrance. Looked for a cat. Danced with the king of the wild things. Excellent-smelling man told me a story in the dark. Cat found me.
He tries to remember the name of the bourbon that Godot had mentioned earlier and pulls his ticket from his jacket pocket.
As he does, a rectangle of paper the size of a business card falls from his pocket and flutters to the floor.
Zachary picks it up, trying to recall if anyone he had spoken to had given him a card.
But it is not a business card. It contains two lines of handwritten text.
Patience & Fortitude
1 a.m. Bring a flower.
Zachary checks his watch: 12:42.
He turns the card over.
On the back is a bee.
As long as there have been bees, there have been keepers.
They say that there was one keeper in the beginning but as the stories multiplied there was a need for more.
The keepers were here before the acolytes, before the guardians.
Before the keepers there were the bees and the stories. Buzzing and humming.
There were keepers before there were keys.
A fact usually forgotten, as they are so synonymous with keys.
It is also a forgotten fact that once there was a single key. A long, thin key made of iron, its bow dipped in gold.
Many copies of it, but a solitary master. The copies worn on chains around each keeper
’s neck. Falling so often against their chests that many wore the impression of the key imbedded in their flesh, metal wearing against skin.
This is the origin of a tradition. No one remembers this now. A mark on a chest arising as an idea because of a mark on a chest. Obvious until it is forgotten.
The role of the keepers has changed over time, more than any of the other paths. Acolytes light their candles. Guardians move unseen and alert.
Keepers once kept only their bees and their stories.
As the space grew larger they kept rooms, dividing stories by type or by length or by unknown whim. Carving shelves for books into rock or building racks of metal or cabinets of glass and tables for the larger volumes. Chairs and pillows for reading and lamps to read by. Adding more rooms as they were needed, round rooms with fires at the center for telling stories aloud. Cavernous rooms with excellent acoustics for performing stories in dance or song. Rooms to repair books, rooms to write books, empty rooms to be used for whatever purposes might arise.
The keepers made doors for the rooms and keys to open them or keep them closed. The same key for every door, at first.
More doors led to more keys. At one time a keeper could identify every door, every room, every book, now they could not. So they acquired individual sections. Wings. Levels. One keeper might not ever meet all the other keepers. They move in circles around each other, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not.
They burned their keys into their chests so that they might be known as keepers at all times. To be reminded that they have a responsibility even if their key (or keys) hang on a hook on a wall and not around their necks.
How one becomes a keeper has also changed.
In the beginning they were chosen and raised as keepers. Born in the Harbor or brought there as infants too young to remember the sky even as a dream. Taught from a tiny age about the books and the bees and given wooden toy keys to play with.
After a time it was decided that the path, like the one of the acolytes, should be voluntary. Unlike the acolytes, the volunteers are put through a training period. If they wish to volunteer after the first training period, they enter a second. After the second, the remainder go through a third.
This is the third period of training.
The potential keeper must pick a story. Any story they please. A fairy tale or a myth or an anecdote about a late night and too many bottles of wine, as long as it is not a story of their own.
(Many who believe at first that they wish to be keepers in truth are poets.)
They study their story for a year.
They must learn it by memory. By more than memory, they must learn it by heart. Not so that they can simply recite the words but so that they feel them, the shape of the story as it changes and lifts and falls and rushes or meanders toward its climax. So that they can recall and relate the story as intimately as if they have lived it themselves and as objectively as if they have played every role within.
After the year of study they are brought to a round room with a single door. Two plain wooden chairs wait in the center, facing each other.
Candles dot the curved wall like stars, glowing from sconces set at irregular heights.
Every bit of the wall that is not occupied by a candle or voided by the door is covered in keys. They stretch from the floor over the wall and continue unseen past the highest candles into the shadows above. Long brass keys and short silver ones, keys with complicated teeth and keys with elaborate decorative heads. Many are ancient and tarnished but as a collection they shimmer and sparkle in the candlelight.
There is a copy here of every key in the Harbor. If one is needed another is made to take its place so that none are ever lost.
The only key that does not have a twin hanging in this room is the key that opens the door in its wall.
It is a distracting room. It is meant to be.
The potential keeper is brought to the room and asked to sit.
(Most choose the chair facing the door. Those who choose to face away from the door almost always perform better.)
They are left alone for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.
Then someone enters the room and sits in the chair opposite them.
And then they tell their story.
They may tell their story however they wish. They may not leave the room and they may not bring anything but themselves into it. No props, no paper to read from.
They do not have to remain in their chair, though their singular audience must.
Some will sit and recite, allowing their voice to do the work.
More animated storytelling can involve anything from standing on the chair to pacing the room.
A potential keeper once stood, walked around to the back of her audience’s chair, leaned in, and whispered the entire story into their ear.
One sang his story, a long, involved tale that moved from sweet and soft and melodic to howling pain and back again.
Another, using her own chair for assistance, extinguished each candle as her story progressed, finishing the terrifying tale in darkness.
When the story is complete the audience departs.
The potential keeper remains alone in the room for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.
A keeper will come to them then. Some will be thanked for their work and their service and dismissed.
For the rest, the keeper will ask the potential keeper to choose a key from the wall. Any key they please.
The keys are not labeled. The choice is made by feel, by instinct, or by fancy.
The key is accepted and the potential keeper returns to their seat. They are blindfolded.
Their chosen key is taken and heated in flame and then it is pressed into the new keeper’s chest. Creating a scarred impression approximately where it might have lain if they had worn it on a chain around their neck.
In the darkness the keeper will see themselves inside the room their chosen key unlocks. And as the sharpness of the pain fades they will begin to see all the rooms. All the doors. All the keys. All the things they keep.
Those who are made keepers are not made keepers because they are organized, because they are mechanically minded or devoted or deemed more worthy than others. Devotion is for acolytes. Worthiness for guardians. Keepers must have spirit and keep it aloft.
They are made keepers because they understand why we are here.
Why it matters.
Because they understand the stories.
They feel the buzzing of the bees in their veins.
But that was before.
Now there is only one.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS checks his watch three times while he waits to retrieve his coat from the coat check. He reads the note again. Patience & Fortitude. 1 a.m. Bring a flower.
He is ninety-four percent certain that Patience and Fortitude are the names of the lions outside the New York Public Library, only a few blocks away. The six percent uncertainty is not enough to be worth considering alternate possibilities and the minutes insist on ticking by at a much quicker pace than they seemed to be earlier.
“Thank you,” he says to the girl who brings him his coat, too enthusiastically judging by the look on her face which is readable even with her mask obscuring part of it, but Zachary is already halfway to the door.
He pauses, remembering the note’s single instruction, and pulls a flower from an arrangement near the door as surreptitiously as he can manage. It is a paper flower, its petals cut from book pages, but it is, technically, a flower. It will have to do.
He takes off his mask before he goes outside, shoving it into the pocket of his coat. His face feels strange without it.
The air outside hits him like a frozen wall and then something harder hits, knocking Zachary to the ground.
&nbs
p; “Oh, I’m so sorry!” a voice above him says. Zachary looks up, blinking, his eyes stinging from the cold and his post-cocktail vision insisting that he is being addressed by a very polite polar bear.
As he blinks more the polar bear loses some but not all of its fuzziness, transforming into a white-haired woman in an equally white fur coat offering him a white-gloved hand.
Zachary accepts and lets the polar-bear woman help him to his feet.
“You poor dear,” she says, brushing dirt off his coat, the white gloves fluttering over his shoulders and his lapels and somehow remaining clean themselves. The woman gives him a red lipstick frown. “Are you all right? I wasn’t even looking where I was walking, silly me.”
“I’m fine,” Zachary says, ice clinging to his trousers and a dull ache in his shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asks, even though neither the woman nor her coat seem to have a hair out of place, and both now appear more silver than white.
“I am uninjured and unobservant as well,” the woman says, her gloves fluttering again. “I’ve not had a man fall at my feet in some time regardless of the circumstances, my dear, so thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome,” Zachary says, his smile automatic as the pain in his shoulder recedes. He almost asks the woman if she has been at the party but he is too concerned about the minutes ticking by. “Have a lovely evening,” he says, leaving her in the pool of light under the hotel awning and continuing down the street.
He checks his watch again as he turns at the corner onto Fifth Avenue. He has a few minutes left.
As he closes the distance between himself and the library, listening to the cabs rushing over the damp pavement, his autopilot starts to falter. His hands are freezing. He looks down at the now somewhat squashed paper flower in his hand. He gives it a closer inspection to see if he can guess what book the petals are made from but the text is in Italian.
Zachary’s pace slows as he approaches the library steps. Despite the late hour there are a handful of people milling around. A cluster of black coats laughs and chatters as they wait for the light to change to cross the street. A couple kisses against a low stone wall. The stairs themselves are empty and the library is closed but the lions remain at their posts.
The Starless Sea Page 8
