The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  “Not yet,” the Keeper says, his tone betraying nothing. “You are welcome to explore at your leisure while you wait. I ask that any locked doors remain locked. I will…inform her of your presence when she arrives.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Have a pleasant day, Mister Rawlins.”

  Zachary takes his cue to leave and returns to the hall, noticing the details now that he has corrective lenses to assist him. It looks a breath away from being a crumbling ruin. Held together by spinning planets and ticking clocks and wishful thinking and string.

  Part of him wants to interrogate the Keeper but most of him prefers to tread lightly given their interaction last night. Maybe Mirabel will be more forthcoming about…well, anything. Whenever she turns up. He remembers the masked king of the wild things and can’t picture her here.

  Zachary picks a different hall to wander down, this one has shelves carved into the stone, books piled in irregular cubbies along with teacups and bottles and stray crayons. This hall has paintings as well, a number of them possibly done by the same artist who painted the seafaring rabbits in his room, highly realistic but with whimsical details. A portrait of a young man in a coat with a great many buttons but the buttons are all tiny clocks, from the collar to the cuffs, each reading different times. Another is a bare forest by moonlight but a single tree is alive with golden leaves. A third is a still life of fruit and wine but the apples are carved into birdcages, tiny red birds inside.

  Zachary tries a few doors that don’t have name tags but most are locked.

  He wonders where the dollhouse is, if it is real.

  Almost as soon as he thinks it he spots a doll on a shelf.

  A single rounded wooden doll painted like a woman wrapped in a robe of stars. Her eyes are closed but her simple painted mouth is curled up in a smile, a few strokes of slivered-moon paint creating an entire expression of expectant calm. An expression like the closing of the eyes before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The doll is carved in a style that reminds him at first of his mother’s kokeshi collection, but then he finds a well-disguised seam around its rounded waist and realizes it is more like a Russian matryoshka. He carefully turns the doll and separates the top half from the lower.

  Within the lady in her robe of stars is an owl.

  Within the owl is another woman, this one wearing gold, her eyes open.

  Within the golden woman is a cat, its eyes the same shade of gold as the woman who came before.

  Within the cat is a little girl with long curly hair and a sky-blue dress, her eyes open but looking off to the side, more interested in something else beyond the person looking at her.

  The tiniest doll is a bee, actual-size.

  Something moves at the end of the hall where the stone is draped with red velvet curtains—something bigger than a cat—but when Zachary looks there is nothing. He joins all of the dolls’ halves together separately and leaves them standing in a row along the shelf, rather than letting them remain trapped all in one person, and then continues on.

  There are so many candles that the scent of beeswax permeates everything, soft and sweet mingling with paper and leather and stone with a hint of smoke. Who lights all of these if there’s no one else here? Zachary wonders as he passes a candelabra holding more than a dozen smoldering tapers, wax dripping down over the stone that has clearly been dripped on by many, many candles before.

  One door opens into a round room with intricately carved walls. A single lamp sits on the floor and as Zachary walks around it the light catches different parts of the carvings, revealing images and text but he cannot read the whole story.

  Zachary walks until the hall opens into a garden, with a soaring ceiling like the marble near the elevator, casting a sunlight-like glow over books abandoned on benches and fountains and piled near statues. He passes a statue of a fox and another that looks like a precarious stack of snowballs. In the center of the room is a partially enclosed space that reminds him of a teahouse. Inside are benches and a life-size statue of a woman seated in a stone chair. Her gown falls around the chair in realistically carved rippling cloth, and everywhere, in her lap, on her arms, tucked into the creases of her gown and the curls in her hair there are bees. The bees are carved from a different color of stone than their mistress, a warmer hue, and appear to be individual pieces. Zachary picks one up and then replaces it. The woman looks down, her hands in her lap with the palms facing up as though she should be reading a book.

  By the statue’s feet, surrounded by bees and resting like an offering, is a glass half filled with dark liquid.

  “I knew I was going to miss it,” someone says behind him.

  Zachary turns. If he hadn’t recognized her voice he would not have guessed this could be the same woman from the party. Her hair without the dark wig is thick and wavy and dyed in various shades of pink beginning in pomegranate at the roots and fading to ballet-slipper at her shoulders. There are traces of gold glitter around her dark eyes. She’s older than he had thought, he’d guessed a few years older than him but it might be more. She wears jeans and tall black boots with long laces and a cream-colored sweater that looks as though it spent as little time as possible in the transition from sheep to clothing and yet the whole ensemble has an air of effortless elegance to it. Several chains draped around her neck hold a number of keys and a locket like Zachary’s compass and something that looks like a bird skull cast in silver. She somehow, even without the tail, still seems like Max.

  “Miss what?” Zachary asks.

  “Every year around this time someone leaves her a glass of wine,” the pink-haired lady answers, pointing at the glass by the statue’s feet. “I’ve never seen who does it, and not for lack of trying. Another year a mystery.”

  “You’re Mirabel.”

  “My reputation precedes me,” Mirabel says. “I have always wanted to say that. We never had proper introductions, did we? You’re Zachary Ezra Rawlins and I am going to call you Ezra, because I like it.”

  “If you call me Ezra I’m going to call you Max.”

  “Deal,” she agrees with that movie-star smile. “I retrieved your stuff from your hotel, Ezra. Left it in the office when I came to find you so there’s probably a cat sitting on it now keeping it safe. Also I checked you out of the aforementioned hotel and I owe you a dance since we were interrupted. How are you and what’s-his-name settling in?”

  “Dorian?”

  “He told you his name is Dorian? How Oscar Wilde indulgent of him, I thought he was bad enough with his drama eyebrows and his sulking. He said I should call him Mister Smith, he must like you better.”

  “Well whatever his name is, he’s not here,” Zachary says. “Those people have him.”

  Mirabel’s smile vanishes. The instant concern doubles the worry that Zachary has been trying to force to the back of his mind.

  “Who has him?” she asks, though Zachary can tell she already knows.

  “The people with the paint and the robes, the Collector’s Club, whoever they are. These people,” he adds, pulling the silver sword from underneath his sweater, cursing when it gets tangled and realizing he is more upset than he would care to admit.

  Mirabel says nothing but she frowns and looks past Zachary at the statue of the woman with her bees and lack of book.

  “Is he already dead?” Zachary asks, though he doesn’t want to hear the answer.

  “If he’s not, it’s for one reason,” Mirabel says, her attention on the statue.

  “Which is?”

  “They’re using him as bait.” Mirabel walks over to the statue and picks up the glass of mystery wine. She contemplates it for a moment and then lifts it to her lips and downs the whole thing. She puts the empty glass back and turns to Zachary.

  “Shall we go and rescue him, Ezra?”

  Once there was a princess who refused to marr
y the prince she was meant to marry. Her family disowned her and she left her kingdom, trading her jewelry and the length of her hair for passage to the next kingdom, and then the next, and then the land beyond that which had no king and there she stayed.

  She was skilled at sewing so she set up a shop in a town that had no seamstress. No one knew she had been a princess, but it was the kind of place that did not ask questions about what you were before.

  “Did this land ever have a king?” the princess asked one of her best customers, an old woman who had lived there for many years but could no longer see well enough to do her own mending.

  “Oh yes,” the old woman said. “It still does.”

  “It does?” This surprised the princess for she had not heard such a thing before.

  “The Owl King,” the old woman said. “He lives on the mountain beyond the lake. He sees the future.”

  The princess knew the old woman was joking with her, for there was nothing on the mountain beyond the lake except for trees and snow and wolves. This Owl King must be a children’s bedtime story, like the Rider on the Night Wind or the Starless Sea. She asked no further questions about the former monarchy.

  After several years the princess became quite close with the blacksmith, and some time after that they were married. On one late night she told him that she had been a princess, about the castle she grew up in, the tiny dogs who slept on silk embroidered pillows, and the shrew-faced prince from the neighboring kingdom she had refused to marry.

  Her blacksmith laughed and did not believe her. He told her that she should have been a bard and not a seamstress and kissed the curve between her waist and her hip but ever after that he called her Princess.

  They had a child, a girl with huge eyes and a screaming cry. The midwife said she was the loudest baby she had ever heard. The girl was born on a night with no moon which was bad luck.

  One week later the blacksmith died.

  The princess worried then as she never had before about bad luck and curses and about the baby’s future. She asked the old woman for advice and the old woman suggested she take the child to the Owl King, who could see such things. If she were a bad-luck child, he would know what to do.

  The princess thought this silly but as the child grew older she would scream at nothing or stare for long hours with her large eyes at empty space.

  “Princess!” the girl said to her mother one day when she was beginning to learn words. “Princess!” she repeated, patting her mother on the knee with a small hand.

  “Who taught you that word?” the princess asked.

  “Daddy,” answered her daughter.

  So the princess took the girl to see the Owl King.

  She took a wagon to the base of the mountain beyond the lake and climbed the old path from there despite the wagon driver’s protests. The climb was long but the day was bright, the wolves asleep, or perhaps the wolves were a thing that people talked about and not a thing that was. The princess stopped occasionally to rest and the girl would play in the snow. Sometimes the path was difficult to see but it was marked with stacked stones and faded banners that might once have been gold.

  After a time the princess and her daughter came to a clearing, all but hidden in a canopy of tall trees.

  The structure in the clearing might once have been a castle but was now a ruin, its turrets broken save for a single tower, and its crumbling walls covered in vines.

  The lanterns by the door were lit.

  Inside, the castle looked quite like the one the princess had lived in once upon a time only dustier and darker. Tapestries with gryphons and flowers and bees hung from the walls.

  “Stay here,” the princess told the girl, placing her on a dusty carpet surrounded by furniture that might once have been grand and impressive.

  While her mother looked upstairs the small girl amused herself by making up stories about the tapestries and talking to the ghosts, for the castle was filled with ghosts and they had not seen a child in some time and crowded around her.

  Then something gold caught the girl’s eye. She toddled over to the shiny object and the ghosts watched as she picked up the single shed feather and marveled that so small a girl could wield such a magical talisman but the girl did not know what the word wield meant or the word talisman so she ignored the ghosts and first tried to eat the feather but then she put it in her pocket after deciding it was not good for eating.

  As this was occurring, the princess found a room with a door marked with a crown.

  She opened the door into the still-standing tower. Here she found a room mostly in shadow, the light filtering in from high above, leaving a soft bright spot in the center of the stone floor. The princess walked into the room, stopping in the light.

  “What do you wish?” a voice came from the darkness, from all around.

  “I wish to know my daughter’s future,” the princess asked, thinking it was not truly an answer to the question because she wished so many other wishes, but it was what brought her here, so it is what she asked.

  “Let me see the girl,” the voice said.

  The princess went and fetched the girl who cried when taken from her newfound ghost friends but laughed and clapped as they followed in a crowd up the stairs.

  The princess carried the girl into the tower room.

  “Alone,” the voice said from the darkness.

  The princess hesitated but then placed the girl in the light and went back to the hall, waiting nervously, surrounded by ghosts she could not see, even as they patted her on the shoulder and told her not to fret.

  Inside the tower room the small girl looked at the darkness and the darkness looked back.

  From the shadows where the girl was staring came a tall figure with the body of a man and the head of an owl. Large round eyes stared down at the girl.

  “Hello,” said the girl.

  “Hello,” said the Owl King.

  After some time the door opened and the princess went back inside to find the girl sitting alone in the pool of light.

  “This child has no future,” the darkness said.

  The princess frowned at the girl, trying to decide what answer she had wanted that was not this one. She wished, for the first time, that she had not left her kingdom at all and that she had made her choices differently.

  Perhaps she could leave the girl here in this castle and tell the town that the wolves took her. She could pack her things and move away and start again.

  “Make me a promise,” the darkness said to the princess.

  “Anything,” the princess answered and immediately regretted it.

  “Bring her back when she is grown.”

  The princess sighed and nodded and took the protesting child away from the castle, back down the mountain and to their small house.

  In the years that followed the princess would sometimes think of her promise and sometimes forget it and sometimes wonder if it had all been a dream. Her daughter was not a bad-luck child after all, she rarely screamed once she was old enough to walk and no longer stared at empty nothingness and seemed luckier than most.

  (The girl had a mark like a scar between her waist and her hip that resembled a feather but her mother could not recall where it came from or how long it had been there.)

  On the days when the princess thought the memory of the castle and the promise was real she told herself that someday she would go back up the mountain and take the girl and if there was nothing there it would be a nice hike and if there was a castle she would figure out what to do when the time came.

  Before the girl was grown the princess fell ill and died.

  Not long after that, her daughter disappeared. No one in the town was surprised.

  “She was always a wild one,” the women who lived long enough to be old women would say.

  The world is
not now as it was then but they continue to tell stories about the castle on the mountain in that town near the lake.

  In one such tale a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers and thought she dreamed. She finds it empty.

  In another version a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers that she thought was a dream. She knocks at the door.

  It swings open for her, held wide in greeting by ghosts she can no longer see.

  The door closes behind her and she is never heard from again.

  In the most rarely told story a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers as if from a dream, a place she was promised to return to though she herself was not the promise-maker.

  The lanterns are lit for her arrival.

  The door opens before she can knock.

  She climbs a familiar stair that she knows was not a dream at all. She walks down a hall she has traversed once before.

  The door marked with the crown is open. The girl steps inside.

  “You have returned,” the darkness says.

  The girl says nothing. This part of what was not a dream at all has haunted her most, more than the ghosts. This room. This voice.

  But she is not afraid.

  From the darkness the owl-headed man appears. He is not as tall as she remembers.

  “Hello,” the girl says.

  “Hello,” the Owl King replies.

  They stare at each other in silence for a time. The ghosts watch from the hall, wondering what might happen, marveling at the feather in her heart that the girl cannot see though she feels it fluttering.

  “Stay three nights in this place,” the Owl King says to the girl who is no longer a girl.

  “Then will you let me go?” the girl asks, though it is not what she means, at all.

  “Then you will no longer desire to leave,” the Owl King says, and everyone knows the Owl King speaks only truth.