The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  The girl spends one night, and then another. By the end of the second night she can see the ghosts again. By the third she has no desire to leave, for who would leave their home once they had found it?

  She is there, still.

  ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS follows Mirabel down passageways taking sharp turns between halls that he had not noticed before and through doors he had not realized were in fact doors. He slows as they pass over a glass floor, staring down at another hallway full of books below their feet but then hurries to keep up. They arrive back in the Heart in half the time that Zachary expected and Mirabel walks not to the elevator as he had anticipated but over to one of the slumped chandeliers where there hangs a faded grey leather jacket and a black messenger bag.

  “Do I need a coat?” Zachary asks as Mirabel puts on her jacket, wondering if he should retrieve his paint-covered one from his room and realizing he forgot to send it down to the Kitchen to be cleaned.

  To his left there is a meow and Zachary turns to see the ginger cat sitting in the doorway of the Keeper’s office. Beyond it, the Keeper sits at his desk, writing, though despite the continuing motion of his pen against paper he is watching them intently over the top of his spectacles. Zachary almost lifts a hand to wave but decides not to.

  “Oh,” Mirabel says, ignoring both the cat and the Keeper and considering Zachary’s linen pants and turtleneck sweater. “Probably, let’s find you one. You should leave your bag.” Zachary puts his bag down while Mirabel takes a quick turn down the hall nearest the elevator and opens a door to reveal a gigantic mess of a closet, piled with coats and hats and typewriters, boxes of pencils and pens and odd pieces of broken statuary. She grabs a hunter green wool coat with brown elbow patches plucked from the chaos like a perfect-condition vintage-store treasure and hands it to Zachary, nimbly stepping over a crumbling bust on the floor, a lone plaster eye staring forlornly at her boots. “This should fit,” she says, and of course it does.

  Zachary follows Mirabel through the door to the glowing antechamber. She presses the button for the elevator and it lights up obediently. The arrow shifts its attention downward.

  “Did you drink it?” Mirabel asks as they wait.

  “Did I what now?”

  She points to the wall where the small glass of liquid had been, opposite the dice.

  “Did you drink it?” she repeats.

  “Oh…yeah, yeah I did.”

  “Good,” Mirabel says.

  “Did I have another option?”

  “You could pour it out or move the glass to the other side of the room or any number of things. But no one’s ever stayed who didn’t drink it.”

  The elevator dings and the doors slide open.

  “What did you do with it?” Zachary asks. Mirabel sits on one of the velvet benches and he takes a seat opposite. He’s pretty sure it’s the same elevator but he’s also pretty sure he dripped paint all over it and the velvet benches are worn but spotless.

  “Me?” Mirabel says. “Nothing.”

  “You left it there?”

  “No, I never did any of it. The dice or the drink me bit. The entrance exam.”

  “How’d you manage that?” Zachary asks.

  “I was born down here.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. I hatched from a golden egg that a Norwegian forest cat sat on for eighteen moons. That cat still hates me.” She pauses for a second before adding, “Yes, really.”

  “Sorry,” Zachary says. “This is all…this is a lot.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Mirabel says. “I’d say I’m sorry you got dropped into the middle of this but truthfully I’m grateful for the company.” She pulls a cigarette case from her bag and opens it, offering it to Zachary and before he can clarify that he doesn’t smoke he sees that the case is filled with small round candies, each one a different color. “Would you like a story? It might make you feel better and they’ll only work while we’re on the elevator.”

  “You’re kidding,” Zachary says. He takes a pale pink disk that looks like it might be peppermint.

  Mirabel smiles at him. She puts the case away without taking one herself.

  Zachary puts the candy on his tongue. He was right, peppermint. No, steel. Cold steel.

  The story unfolds in his head more than in his ears and there are words but there aren’t, pictures and sensations and tastes that change and progress from the initial mint and metal through blood and sugar and summer air. Then it’s gone.

  “What was that?” Zachary says.

  “That was a story,” Mirabel says. “You can try to tell it to me but I know they’re hard to translate.”

  “It was…” Zachary pauses, trying to wrap his head around the brief, strange experience that did indeed leave a story in his head, like a half-remembered fairy tale. “There was a knight, like the shining-armor type. Many people loved him but he never loved any of them in return and he felt badly about all the hearts he broke so he carved a heart on his skin for each broken one. Rows and rows of scarred hearts on his arms and his legs and across his chest. Then he met someone he wasn’t expecting and…I…I don’t remember what happened after that.”

  “Knights who break hearts and hearts that break knights,” Mirabel says.

  “Do you know it?” Zachary asks.

  “No, each one’s different. They have similar elements, though. All stories do, no matter what form they take. Something was, and then something changed. Change is what a story is, after all.”

  “Where did those come from?”

  “I found a jar full of them years ago. I like to keep them on hand, like always having a book with you, and I do that, too.”

  Zachary looks at this pink-haired mystery woman, with the knight and his hearts lingering on his tongue.

  “What is this?” he asks. Meaning all of it, everything, and trusting she will understand.

  “I will never have a satisfying answer to that question, Ezra,” she says and the smile that accompanies the sentiment is a sad one. “This is the rabbit hole. Do you want to know the secret to surviving once you’ve gone down the rabbit hole?”

  Zachary nods and Mirabel leans forward. Her eyes are ringed with gold.

  “Be a rabbit,” she whispers.

  Zachary stares at her and somewhere in the staring he realizes he feels a little bit calmer.

  “You painted my door in New Orleans,” he says. “When I was a kid.”

  “I did. I thought you were going to open it, too. It’s a litmus test: If you believe enough to try to open a painted door you’re more likely to believe in wherever it leads.”

  The elevator jolts to a stop.

  “That was fast,” Zachary remarks. If his concept of time is not utterly failing him, his own descent had taken three times as long, at least. Maybe his candy story took more time to dissolve than he’d thought.

  “I told it we were in a hurry,” Mirabel says.

  The elevator opens in what looks to be the same stone column staircase with its suspended lanterns that Zachary remembers from before.

  “Question,” he says.

  “You’re going to have a lot of those,” Mirabel says as they climb the stairs. “You might want to start writing them down.”

  “Where are we now, exactly?”

  “We are in between,” Mirabel says. “We’re not in New York yet, if that’s what you mean. But we’re also not there anymore, either. It’s an extension of the elevator, way back in the day there were stairs and you kept walking and walking. Or you fell. Or there was just a door. I don’t know, there aren’t many records. Sometimes there aren’t stairs here but the elevator has been around for a while. Like a tesseract except for space instead of time. Or are tesseracts for both? I don’t remember, I’m ashamed of myself.”

  They stop at a door at the top
of the stairs, set into the rock. A simple wooden door, nothing fancy, no symbols. Mirabel takes one of the keys from around her neck and unlocks it.

  “I hope they didn’t put a bookcase in front of it again,” she says as she pushes it open a few inches and then stops, peering out the opening before pushing it open farther. “Quick,” she says to Zachary, pulling him through and closing the door behind them.

  Zachary glances back and there is no door, just a wall.

  “Look for it,” Mirabel says and then Zachary can make out the lines, pencil lines on the wall thin as paint cracks forming the door, a subtle shading that could be a smudge forming a handle above a mark that is more clearly a keyhole.

  “This is a door?” he asks.

  “This is an incognito door for emergencies. I don’t expect anyone to find it but I keep it locked anyway. I’m surprised they haven’t but I’m here a lot, they probably think it’s for different book-related reasons. Book places tend to be more receptive to doors, I think it’s because of the high concentration of stories all in one place.”

  Zachary looks around. The slice of bare wall is tucked between tall wooden bookshelves stuffed full of books, some of them labeled with red signs that look familiar but he’s not sure why. Mirabel beckons him forward and as they move from the stacks out to a larger space with tables of books and another covered with vinyl records and more signs, past a few people browsing quietly, he realizes why the space is familiar.

  “Are we at the Strand?” he asks as they walk up a wide flight of stairs.

  “What gave you that idea?” Mirabel asks. “Was it that big red sign that says ‘Strand’ and ‘Eighteen Miles of Books’? That quantification feels inaccurate, I bet there’s more than that.”

  Zachary does recognize the more crowded main floor of the enormous bookstore with its tables of new arrivals and best sellers and staff picks (he has always been fond of staff picks) and tote bags, lots of tote bags. It strikes him that it feels ever so slightly like the book-filled space somewhere below it, but on a smaller scale. The way a stray scent might feel like a remembered taste while not grasping the experience entirely.

  They navigate their way past tables and shoppers and the long line by the cashiers but soon they are out on the sidewalk in a blisteringly cold wind and Zachary very much wants to go back inside because the books are there and also because linen pants were not designed for January snow and slush.

  “It shouldn’t be too long to walk,” Mirabel says. “Sorry it’s so poetry today.”

  “So what?” Zachary asks, not certain he heard her correctly.

  “Poetry,” Mirabel repeats. “The weather. It’s like a poem. Where each word is more than one thing at once and everything’s a metaphor. The meaning condensed into rhythm and sound and the spaces between sentences. It’s all intense and sharp, like the cold and the wind.”

  “You could just say it’s cold out.”

  “I could.”

  The light falling over the streets is low, late afternoon. They dodge pedestrians on their way up Broadway and by Union Square before taking a right and then Zachary loses his familiar Manhattan landmarks, the map of the city in his mind dissolving into gridded blocks that disappear into nothingness and river. Mirabel is better at dodging pedestrians than he is.

  “We have a stop to make first,” she says, pausing in front of a building and opening a glass door, holding it open to allow a couple in layers upon layers of coats and scarves to exit.

  “Are you serious?” Zachary says, looking up at the ubiquitous green mermaid sign. “We’re stopping for coffee?”

  “Caffeine is an important weapon in my arsenal,” Mirabel replies as they go inside and join the end of the short line. “What would you like?”

  Zachary sighs.

  “I’m buying,” Mirabel prods. She pokes him in the arm. He doesn’t remember when she put on knit fingerless gloves and his own freezing extremities have glove envy.

  “Tall skim milk matcha green tea latte,” Zachary says, annoyed that warm beverages actually seem like a good idea given the weather with its cold poetry.

  “Got it,” Mirabel replies with a thoughtful nod like she’s sizing him up via Starbucks order. He’s not sure what matcha and foam say about him.

  Everything seems normal, standing in line for coffee, the floor damp with melted slush. The glass case filled with neatly labeled baked goods. People sitting in corners staring at laptops.

  It’s too normal. It’s disconcerting and making him dizzy and maybe once you go to wonderland you’re supposed to stay there because nothing will ever be the same in the real world, in the other world, afterward. Afterworld. He wonders if the maybe-students, maybe-writers typing on their computers would believe him if he told them there was an underground trove of books and stories beneath their feet. They wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He’s not sure he does. The only thing keeping him from writing the whole thing off as an extraordinary hallucination is the pink-haired lady next to him. He stares at the back of Mirabel’s head as she investigates a shelf full of travel mugs. Her ears are pierced multiple times with silver hoops. There’s a scar behind her ear, a line maybe an inch long. Her roots are starting to show near her scalp, a dark brown probably close to the color of the wig she wore at the party and he wonders if she went dressed as herself. He tries to remember if he saw her talk to anyone else. If she interacted with anyone but him.

  He couldn’t have made up this much detail on a person. Imaginary ladies can’t order coffee at Starbucks, probably.

  It is a relief when the girl behind the register looks directly at Mirabel and asks what she would like.

  “A grande honey stardust, no whip,” Mirabel says and though Zachary thinks maybe he heard her wrong the cashier girl punches the order onto her screen without question. “And a tall skim milk matcha green tea latte.”

  “Name?”

  “Zelda,” Mirabel says.

  The girl gives her a total and Mirabel pays in cash, dropping her change into the tip jar. Zachary follows her to the other end of the counter.

  “What was that you ordered?” he asks.

  “Information,” Mirabel responds but does not elaborate. “Not enough people take advantage of the secret menu, have you ever noticed that?”

  “I go to independent coffee shops that write self-deprecating menus on chalkboards.”

  “Yet you had a very specific Starbucks order at the ready.”

  “Zelda,” the barista calls out, placing two cups on the counter.

  “Is that Zelda for Princess or Fitzgerald?” Zachary asks as Mirabel picks them up.

  “Little bit of both,” she says, handing him the smaller cup. “C’mon, let’s brave the poetry again.”

  Outside the light is dwindling, the air colder. Zachary clings to his cup and takes a sip of too-hot green foam.

  “What did you really order?” he asks as Mirabel starts walking.

  “It’s basically an Earl Grey tea with soy milk and honey and vanilla,” Mirabel says, holding up her cup. “But this is why I ordered it.” She lifts it higher so Zachary can see the six-digit number written in Sharpie on the bottom of the cup: 721909.

  “What does that mean?” he asks.

  “You’ll see.”

  The light is fading by the time they reach the next block, leaving a sunset glow.

  “How do you know Dorian?” Zachary asks, trying to sort through his questions and thinking maybe he should get a notebook or something to keep them in, they fly in and out of his head so fast. He takes another sip of his quickly cooling latte.

  “He tried to kill me once,” Mirabel says.

  “He what?” Zachary asks, as Mirabel stops in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Here we go,” she says.

  Zachary hadn’t even recognized the tree-lined street. The building with its C
ollector’s Club sign looks normal and friendly and maybe a little ominous but that’s more to do with the lack of people on this particular block.

  “Are you done with that?” Mirabel asks, gesturing at his cup. Zachary takes a last sip and hands it to her. She nestles both empty cups into a pile of snow by the stairs.

  “There’s another place that’s also called the Collector’s Club not far from here,” she remarks as they approach the door.

  “There is?” Zachary asks, regretting not asking if Mirabel has a plan of some sort.

  “That one is for stamp collectors,” she says.

  She turns the handle on the door and to Zachary’s surprise it opens. The small antechamber is dark, save for a red light on the wall next to a small screen. An alarm system.

  Mirabel punches 7-2-1-9-0-9 into the alarm keypad.

  The light turns green.

  Mirabel opens the second door.

  The foyer is dim, only a purplish light filters through the tall windows, making the ribbons with their doorknobs appear a pale blue. There are more of them than Zachary remembered.

  He wants to ask Mirabel how she managed to order the alarm code at Starbucks and also what precisely she meant by tried to kill me once but thinks silence might be better. Then Mirabel pulls one of the doorknob ribbons, tearing it from wherever it was hooked to the ceiling high above, and it falls in a clattering sound of doorknobs hitting other doorknobs, a cacophony of low tones like bells.

  So much for silence.

  “You could have rung the doorbell,” Zachary observes.

  “They wouldn’t have let us in if I did that,” Mirabel responds. She picks up a doorknob—a coppery one with a greenish patina—and glances at its tag. Zachary reads it upside down: Tofino, British Columbia, Canada, 8.7.05. “And they only set the alarm when no one’s on duty.” They walk farther down the hall and she runs her fingers along the ribbons like the strings of a harp. “Can you imagine all the doors?” she asks.

  “No,” Zachary answers honestly. There are too many. He reads more tags as they pass: Mumbai, India, 2.12.13. Helsinki, Finland, 9.2.10. Tunis, Tunisia, 1.4.01.