Sometimes he feels he has lost his own story. Fallen out of its pages and landed here, in between, but he remains in his story. He cannot leave it no matter how he tries.
The man lost in time walks along the shore of the sea and does not look up to see the lack of stars. He wanders through empty cities of honey and bone, down streets that once rang with music and laughter. He lingers in abandoned temples, lighting candles for forgotten gods and running his fingers over the fossils of unaccepted offerings. He sleeps in beds that no one has dreamed upon in centuries and his own sleep is deep, his dreams as unfathomable as his waking hours.
At first the bees watched him. Followed him while he walked and hovered while he slept. They thought he might be someone else.
He is just a boy. A man. Something in between.
Now the bees ignore him. They go about their own business. They decided that one man out of his depth is no cause for alarm but even the bees are wrong from time to time.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS waits in the cold for so long that he rings the bell of the Collector’s Club a second time with a nearly frozen finger. He’s only sure he managed to ring it at all because he can hear a low chime from within the building.
After the second chime he hears someone moving behind the door. The click of multiple locks being undone.
The door opens a few inches, a metal chain keeping it latched but from the opening a short young woman looks up at him. She is younger than Zachary but not so much so that she would be considered a girl and reminds him of someone or maybe she has one of those faces. The look she gives him is a mix of wariness and boredom. Apparently even strange covert organizations have interns that get stuck with the lousy shifts.
“May I help you?” she asks.
“I, uh, I’m dropping this off for the archive,” Zachary says. He pulls The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology partway out of his coat pocket. The woman peers at it but does not ask to see it. She asks for something else.
“Your name?”
This is a question Zachary has not anticipated.
“Does it matter?” he asks, in the best impression of Dorian he can manage. He shifts his coat in what he hopes is a nonchalant way, making sure the silver sword is visible.
The woman frowns.
“You may leave the item with me,” she says. “I will see that it is—”
“Alex sent me,” Zachary interrupts.
The woman’s expression shifts. The boredom seeps out of it and the wariness takes over.
“Just a minute,” she says. The door closes entirely and Zachary starts to panic but then realizes that she is unlatching the chain. The door opens again almost immediately.
The woman ushers him into a small foyer lined with frosted glass that prevents him from seeing what lies beyond it. Another door waits on the opposite wall, also composed mostly of frosted glass. The double entryway seems more about obfuscation than security.
The woman locks and chains the front door and then hurriedly moves to unlock the frosted-glass door. She wears a long blue dress that looks simple and old-fashioned, like a robe, with a high neckline and large pockets on either side. Around her neck is a silver chain with a sword, a different design than the one that Zachary wears, thinner and shorter, but similar.
“This way,” she says, pushing the frosted-glass door open.
Should I pretend I’ve been here before or not? That would have been a good question to ask Dorian. Zachary guesses the answer would have been yes, considering he’s supposed to know where the back door is, but it makes that more difficult not to stare.
The hallway is bright and high-ceilinged with white walls, lit by a line of crystal chandeliers running from the foyer to the stairs at the back. A deep blue carpet covers the stairs and flows down into the hall like a waterfall, catching the irregular light that makes it appear even more liquid.
But what Zachary cannot help but stare at are the doorless doorknobs hanging on either side of the hall.
Suspended from white ribbons at varying heights there are brass doorknobs and crystal doorknobs and carved-ivory doorknobs. Some seem to have rusted to the point of staining the length of ribbon to which they cling. Others have gathered greyish-green patinas. Some hang near the ceiling far above Zachary’s head and others skim the floor. Some are broken. Some are attached to escutcheons and others are only knobs or handles. All of them are missing their doors.
Each doorknob has a tag, a string attaching a rectangular piece of paper that reminds Zachary of the type of tag placed on the toes of corpses in mortuaries. He slows his pace so he can take a closer look. He catches city names and numbers he thinks might be latitudes and longitudes. Along the bottom of each tag is a date.
As they walk through the hall the air around them shifts over the ribbons causing the doorknobs to sway gently, knocking into their neighbors with a sorrowful hollow ringing sound.
There are hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Zachary and his escort ascend the waterfall of stairs in silence, the doorknobs echoing behind them.
The stairs turn and loop in both directions but the woman goes up the set on the right. A larger chandelier hangs in the center of the looping stairs, lightbulbs obscured behind droplets of crystal.
Both sides of the stairs lead to the same hall on an upper floor, this one with a lower ceiling and no ribbon-strung doorknobs. This hallway has its own doors, each painted a matte black in stark contrast with the white walls surrounding them. Each door is numbered, a brass numeral in the center. As they walk down the hall the numbers are all low but do not appear to be sequential. They pass a door marked with a six and another with a two and then eleven.
They stop at a door near the end of the hall by the large barred window Zachary could see from the street, this one marked with an eight. The woman pulls a small ring of keys from her pocket and unlocks the door.
A loud chime strikes from below them. The woman’s hand pauses over the doorknob and Zachary can see the conflict playing out on her face, to go or to stay.
The chime strikes again.
“I can take care of this,” Zachary says, holding up the book for good measure. “I’ll see myself out the back. No worries.”
Too casual, he thinks to himself but his escort bites her lip and then nods.
“Thank you, sir,” she says, returning her keys to her pocket. “Have a pleasant evening.”
She takes off down the hall at a much brisker pace than before as the chime rings a third time.
Zachary watches until she reaches the stairs and then he opens the door.
The room inside is darker than the hallway, the lights arranged in a fashion he has occasionally seen in museums: the contents lit at carefully chosen angles. The bookshelves that line the wall are lit from within, books and objects glowing, including what appears to be an actual human hand floating in a glass jar, palm facing outward as though in greeting. Two long glass display cases run the length of the room, lit from the inside so the books appear to float. Heavy curtains hang over the windows.
It does not take Zachary long to find the book he has been sent for, there are ten books in one case and eight in the other, and only one is bound in brown leather. The light around it catches the formerly gilded edges of the pages, the pieces around the corners that have held on to their gold more tightly shimmering. It is one of the smaller volumes, thankfully, easily pocket-size. Others are larger and some appear quite heavy.
Zachary inspects the case, trying to recall if any of his instructions included how to open it. He cannot find any hinges or latches.
“Puzzle box,” Zachary mutters to himself.
He looks closer. The glass is set in panels, each book in its own transparent box even though the boxes are connected one to another. There are nearly invisible seams separating one from the next. The brown book sit
s in a section near one end, second from the last on the left. He checks it from both sides and then crawls under the table to see if it opens from beneath but finds nothing. The table has a heavy base made of some kind of metal.
Zachary stands and stares at the case. The lights are wired, so the wires must go somewhere, but none are visible on the outside. If the wires run through the table, maybe the entire thing is electric.
He searches the perimeter of the room for switches. The one next to the door turns on a chandelier he didn’t even notice in the shadows above. It’s simpler than those in the hall and doesn’t add much light.
The wall with the windows has complicated latches but nothing else. Zachary pulls open one set of curtains and finds a window that overlooks the brick wall of the building next door.
He pulls back the other curtains and finds not a window but a wall with a line of switches on it.
“Ha!” he says aloud.
There are eight switches in something that resembles a fuse box, and none of them are labeled. Zachary switches the first one and the lights on one of the bookcases go out, the suspended hand vanishing. He turns it back on and skips down to the eighth switch, guessing that the top six are the shelves.
The lights switch off in one case, not the one he’s attempting to open, the other one, and there is a clanking noise. He goes to inspect the case and finds that the glass has remained in place but the base has sunk down about a foot lower, allowing access to the books.
Zachary hurries back to the switches and turns the eighth switch back on as he turns the seventh one off. The clanking doubles as the tables move.
The brown leather book is now accessible and Zachary takes it from its spot in the case. He inspects it as he walks back to the switches. It reminds him of Sweet Sorrows, the quality of the leather and the fact that it has nothing printed on the outside, no visible title or author. He opens the cover and the pages are illuminated with beautiful borders and illustrations but the text is in Arabic. He closes it again and puts it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
Zachary toggles switch number seven back on.
But the lights remain off, the case remains lowered. The clanking noise is replaced by the screech of metal on metal.
Zachary switches it off again. Then he remembers.
He takes The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology from his coat and places it in the spot where the brown leather volume had been and tries the switch again.
This time it clanks happily and the lights pop back on as the case slides closed, locking the books inside.
Zachary glances at his watch, realizing that he has no idea how long he has been in the room. He straightens the curtains and puts the book in his coat. He turns off the chandelier and steps quietly back into the hall.
He closes the door as softly as he can. His escort is nowhere to be seen but he hears a voice from the floor below as he makes his way toward the stairs.
When he is halfway down the stairs on the landing, about to turn down toward the main hall, the voice raises and he can hear it better.
“No, you don’t understand, he’s here now,” the escort who is no longer escorting him says.
A pause. Zachary slows his steps, peering around the turn in the stairs as the voice continues, sounding more and more anxious. There is an open door on the side of the hall close to the stairs that he had not noticed before.
“I think he knows more than we’d anticipated…I don’t know if he has the book, I thought…I’m sorry. I didn’t…I am listening, sir. Under any circumstances, understood.”
From the pauses Zachary guesses she’s on a phone. He creeps down the stairs as quickly and quietly as he can, careful not to start the doorknobs swaying on their ribbons as he reaches the hallway. From here he can see into the room where the young woman is standing with her back toward him, speaking into the receiver of an old-fashioned black rotary telephone that sits on a dark wood desk. Next to the phone is a ball of yarn and half a scarf looped on knitting needles and then Zachary realizes why the woman looked familiar.
She was in Kat’s class. The supposed English major who knit the entire time.
Zachary ducks around the back of the stairs as stealthily as he can manage and stops out of sight. The voice has paused but he hasn’t heard the phone receiver replaced in its cradle. He continues along the side of the stairs unseen until he comes to a door. He opens it carefully and quietly, uncovering a narrow flight of much less ornate stairs leading to the floor below.
Zachary closes the door gently behind him and creeps down the stairs slowly, hoping with each footfall that they won’t creak. Halfway down he thinks he hears the phone being hung up, and then a sound that might be someone heading up the stairs above.
These stairs end in an unlit room full of boxes but light filters through a pair of frosted-glass doors that Zachary guesses is his exit. There doesn’t appear to be another one, but he looks just in case.
The doors have several latches but all of them are easily undone, and it takes less time than Zachary expects to get back outside in the cold. A light snow has begun to fall, bright flakes catch in the wind and circle around him, many of them never finding their way to the ground.
A short flight of stairs leads down to a garden that is mostly ice and rocks with a fence of black iron bars that match the ones on the windows. The gate is at the back, the alleyway behind it. Zachary walks toward it, slower than he would prefer, but his dress shoes are not well-suited to the slippery stone.
A siren wails in the distance. A car horn joins it.
Zachary brushes a layer of ice from the latch on the gate, beginning to breathe a little easier.
“Leaving so soon?” a voice behind him asks.
Zachary turns, his hand on the gate.
Standing on the stairs in front of the open glass doors is the polar-bear woman, still in her fur coat, looking both more and less like a bear as she smiles at him.
Zachary says nothing, but can’t bring himself to move.
“Stay and have a cup of tea,” the woman says, casual and gracious, seemingly ignoring the fact that they are standing in the snow as he is in the midst of escaping into the night with stolen literature.
“I really must be going,” Zachary says, choking back the nervous laugh that threatens to accompany the statement.
“Mister Rawlins,” the woman says, descending a single step toward him but then stopping again, “I assure you that you are in over your head. Whatever you think is going on here, whatever side you have been coerced to think you are on, you are mistaken. You have stumbled into something you have no business meddling with. Please come inside out of the cold, we shall have a cup of tea and a polite discussion and then you may be on your way. I shall pay for your return train to Vermont as a gesture of goodwill. You will go back to your studies and we will all pretend none of this ever happened.”
Zachary’s thoughts bubble over with questions and debates. Who should he trust, what should he do, how did he manage to go from near-clueless to deeply embroiled in whatever this is in a single evening. He has no real reason to trust Dorian more than he trusts this woman. He doesn’t have enough answers to go with all of his questions.
But he has an answer, one that makes this decision in this moment in the snow an easy one.
No way is he going to go home and play pretend. Not now.
“I respectfully decline,” Zachary says. He pulls the gate open and it screeches, sending pieces of ice falling over his shoulders. He doesn’t look back at the woman on the stairs, he runs down the alleyway as fast as his impractical footwear will allow.
There is another gate at the end of the alley, and as he fusses with the latch he spots Dorian across the street, leaning against a building and reading by the light from the still-open bar on the corner, deeply absorbed in Sweet Sorrows and frowning at it in
a way that Zachary finds familiar.
Zachary ignores both his instructions and the streetlight, hurrying across the empty street.
“I thought I told you—” Dorian starts, but Zachary doesn’t let him finish.
“I just declined an invitation to late-night intimidation tea from a lady in a fur coat and I’m guessing you know who she is. She certainly knew who I was so I don’t think any of this is as covert as you would like it to be.”
Dorian puts the book back in his coat and mutters something in a language Zachary doesn’t recognize but he guesses the meaning is probably profane and turns toward the street with his hand raised. It takes Zachary a moment to realize that he’s hailing a cab.
Dorian ushers Zachary into the cab before he can ask where it is they’re going but directs the driver to Central Park West and Seventy-Seventh. Then he sighs and puts his head in his hands.
Zachary turns and looks behind them as they pull away from the curb. The younger woman is standing on the street corner, a dark coat pulled over her robe. He cannot tell if she has seen them or not from this distance.
“Did you get the book?” Dorian asks him.
“Yes I did,” Zachary says. “But before I give it to you, you’re going to tell me why I did that.”
“You did that because I asked you nicely,” Dorian says and it doesn’t annoy Zachary as much as he expects it to. “And because it belongs to me, not to them, as much as a book belongs to anyone. I got your book back for you, you got mine back for me.”
Zachary watches Dorian as he stares out the window at the snow. He looks tired. Weary-tired and maybe a little sad. The paper flower is still tucked in the lapel of his coat. Zachary decides not to pry any further about the book for now.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“We need to get to the door.”
“There’s a door? Here?”
“There should be if Mirabel held up her part of the bargain and wasn’t stopped in the process,” Dorian explains. “But we need to get there before they do.”
The Starless Sea Page 10
