Zachary re-buttons the extra button, noticing as he does that while there is no sword there is a hint of ink higher, around Dorian’s shoulders. The edge of a tattoo covering his back and neck, but he can only make out branch-like shapes in the light.
He wonders about the line between keeping an eye on someone who is unconscious and watching someone sleep and decides maybe he should read. The Kitchen would probably make him a drink, but he’s not thirsty, or hungry, though he thinks he should be.
Zachary gets up from his chair, relieved that the action doesn’t revive the blurry underwater feeling, and finds his bags where Mirabel left them near the door and realizes that he’s finally been reunited with his duffel. He takes out his phone, its battery unsurprisingly dead, though he doubts it would have a signal down here anyway. He puts it away and retrieves the brown leather book of fairy tales from the satchel.
Zachary returns to the chair by the bed and reads. He is partway through a story about an innkeeper in a snow-covered inn that is so absorbing he can almost hear the wind when he notices the incense has burned out.
He puts the book down on the nightstand and lights another cone of incense. The smoke wafts over the book as it catches.
“At least you have your book back even though I don’t have mine,” Zachary remarks aloud. He thinks perhaps he will have a drink, maybe a glass of water to get the honey taste out of his mouth, and goes to inscribe a request for the Kitchen. His hand is on the pen when he hears Dorian’s voice behind him, sleepy but clear.
“I put your book in your coat.”
Simon is an only child, his name inherited from an older brother who died at birth. He is a replacement. He sometimes wonders if he is living someone else’s life, wearing someone else’s shoes and someone else’s name.
Simon lives with his uncle (his dead mother’s brother) and his aunt, constantly reminded that he is not their son. The specter of his mother hangs over him. His uncle only mentions her when drinking (also the only time he will call Simon a bastard) but he drinks often. Jocelyn Keating is invoked as everything from a trollop to a witch. Simon doesn’t remember enough of his mother to know if she was a witch or not. He once dared to suggest he might not be a bastard, as no one is certain of his parentage and his mother was with whatever man might be his father long enough for there to be two Simons so they might have secretly been married but that got a wineglass thrown at his head (badly aimed). His uncle did not recall the exchange afterward. A maid cleared away the broken glass.
On Simon’s eighteenth birthday he is presented with an envelope. Its wax seal has an impression of an owl and the paper is yellowed with age. The front reads:
For Simon Jonathan Keating on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of his birth
It had been kept in some bank box somewhere, his uncle explains. Delivered that morning.
“It’s not my birthday,” Simon observes.
“We were never certain of your birth date,” his uncle states with a matter-of-fact dullness. “Apparently it is today. Many happy returns.”
He leaves Simon alone with the envelope.
It is heavy. There is more than a letter inside. Simon breaks the seal, surprised that his uncle did not already open it himself.
He hopes that his mother has written him a message, speaking to him across time.
It is not a letter.
The paper has no salutation, no signature. Only an address. Somewhere in the country.
And there is a key.
Simon turns the paper over and finds two additional words on the reverse.
memorize & burn
He reads the address again. He looks at the key. He rereads the front of the envelope.
Someone has given him a country house. Or a barn. Or a locked box in a field.
Simon reads the address a third time, then a fourth. He closes his eyes and repeats it to himself and checks that he is correct, reads it one more time for good measure and drops the paper into the fireplace.
“What was in that envelope?” his uncle asks, too casually, at dinner.
“Just a key,” Simon answers.
“A key?”
“A key. A keepsake, I suppose.”
“Harrumph,” his uncle grumbles into his wineglass.
“I might pay a visit to my school friends in the country next weekend,” Simon remarks mildly and his aunt comments on the weather and his uncle harrumphs again and one anxious week later Simon is on a train with the key in his pocket, staring out the window and repeating the address to himself.
At the station he asks for directions and is pointed down a winding road, past empty fields.
He does not see the stone cottage until he is on its doorstep. It is concealed behind ivy and brambles, a garden left to its own devices that has nearly consumed the building it surrounds. A low stone wall separates it from the road, the gate rusted shut.
Simon climbs over the wall, thorns tugging at his trousers. He pulls down a curtain of ivy in order to access the cottage door.
He tries the key in the lock. It turns easily but getting inside is another matter. He pushes and shoves and clears more ivy vines before convincing it to open at last.
Simon sneezes as he enters the cottage. Each step kicks up more dust as he walks and it floats through the low sunlight, among leaf-shaped shadows creeping over the floors.
One of the more persistent tendrils of ivy has found its way through a window crack and curled around a table leg. Simon opens the window, allowing fresher air and brighter light inside.
Teacups are stacked in an open cupboard. A kettle hangs by the fireplace. The furniture (a table and chairs, two armchairs by the fire, and a tarnished brass bed) is covered in books and papers.
Simon opens a book and finds his mother’s name inscribed inside the cover. Jocelyn Simone Keating. He never knew her middle name. He understands where his name originates. He is not certain he likes this cottage, but apparently it is his now to like or dislike as he pleases.
Simon opens another window as wide as the ivy permits. He finds a broom in a corner and sweeps, attempting to banish as much dust as he can as the light fades.
He does not have a plan, which now feels foolish.
Simon had thought that someone might be here. His mother, perhaps. Surprise, not dead. Witches can be hard to kill if he remembers his stories correctly. It could pass for a witch’s cottage. A studious witch with a fondness for tea.
The sweeping would be easier if he swept out the back door, so he unlatches and opens it and finds himself looking not at the field behind the house but down a spiraling stone stair.
Simon looks out the ivy-covered window to the right of the door and into the fading sunlight.
He looks back through the door. The space is wider than the wall, easily overlapping the window.
At the bottom of the stairs there is a light.
Broom in hand, Simon descends until he reaches two glowing lanterns flanking an iron grate, like a cage set into the rock.
Simon opens the cage and steps inside. There is a brass lever. He pulls it.
The door slides shut. Simon glances up at a lantern suspended from the ceiling and the cage sinks.
Simon stands bewildered with his broom as they descend and then the cage shudders to a stop. The door opens.
Simon steps into a glowing chamber. There are two pedestals and a large door.
Both pedestals have cups set upon them. Both cups have instructions.
Simon drinks the contents of one, the taste like blueberries and cloves and night air.
The dice in the other he rolls upon the pedestal, watching as they settle and then both pedestals sink into the stone.
The door opens into a large hexagonal room with a pendulum hanging from the c
enter. It glows with dancing light from a number of lamps flanking halls that twist out of sight.
Everywhere there are books.
“May I be of assistance, sir?”
Simon turns to find a man with long white hair standing in a doorway. Somewhere farther off he can hear laughter and faint music.
“What is this place?” Simon asks.
The man looks at Simon and glances down at the broom in his hand.
“If you would come with me, sir,” the man says, beckoning him forward.
“Is this a library?” Simon asks, looking around at the books.
“After a fashion.”
Simon follows the man into a room with a desk stacked with papers and books. Tiny drawers with metal pulls and handwritten plaques line the walls. A cat on the desk looks up as he approaches.
“First visits can be disorienting,” the man says, opening a ledger. He dips a quill in ink. “What door did you enter through?”
“Door?”
The man nods.
“It…it was in a cottage not far from Oxford. Someone left me the key.”
The man had started writing in the ledger but now stops and looks up.
“Are you Jocelyn Keating’s son?” he asks.
“Yes,” Simon answers, a little too enthusiastically. “Did you know her?”
“I was acquainted with her, yes,” the man answers. “I am sorry for your loss,” he adds.
“Was she a witch?” Simon asks, looking at the cat on the desk.
“If she was she did not confide such information in me,” the man responds. “Your full name, Mister Keating?”
“Simon Jonathan Keating.”
The man inscribes it in the ledger.
“You may call me the Keeper,” the man says. “What did you roll?”
“Pardon?”
“Your dice, in the antechamber.”
“Oh, they were all little crowns,” Simon explains, recalling the dice on the pedestal. He had tried to see the other pictures but only made out a heart and feather.
“All of them?” the Keeper asks.
Simon nods.
The Keeper frowns and marks the ledger, the quill scratching along the paper. The cat on the desk lifts a paw to bat at it.
The Keeper puts down the quill to the cat’s chagrin and walks to a cabinet on the other side of the room.
“Initial visits are best kept short, though you are welcome back at any time.” The Keeper hands Simon a chain with a locket on the end. “This will point you to the entrance if you lose your way. The elevator will return you to your cottage.”
Simon looks at the compass in his hand. The needle spins in the center. My cottage, he thinks.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Do please let me know if I can be of any assistance.”
“May I leave this here?” Simon holds up the broom.
“Of course, Mister Keating,” the Keeper says, gesturing at the wall by the door. Simon leans the broom against it.
The Keeper returns to his desk. The cat yawns.
Simon walks out of the office and watches the pendulum.
He wonders if he is asleep and dreaming.
He takes a book from a stack near the wall and puts it down again. He wanders down a hallway lined with curving shelves so the books surround him at all angles, like a tunnel. He cannot tell how the ones above his head manage not to fall.
He tries opening doors. Some are locked but many open, revealing rooms filled with more books, chairs and desks and tables with bottles of ink and bottles of wine and bottles of brandy. The sheer volume of books intimidates him. He does not know how one would choose what to read.
He hears more people than he sees, footsteps and whispers close but unseen. He spots a figure in a white robe lighting candles and a woman so absorbed in the book she is reading that she does not look up as he passes.
He walks through a hall filled with paintings, all images of impossible buildings. Floating castles. Mansions melded together with ships. Cities carved into cliffs. The books around them all seem to be volumes on architecture. A corridor leads him to an amphitheater where actors appear to be rehearsing Shakespeare. He recognizes it as King Lear, though the parts have been reversed so there are three sons with a tremendous old woman as their mother descending into madness. Simon watches for some time before wandering on.
There is music playing somewhere, a pianoforte. He follows the sound but cannot locate its source.
Then a door catches his eye. A wardrobe overflowing with books has been placed partially in front of it, leaving it half hidden or half found.
The door wears a brass image of a heart aflame.
The doorknob turns easily when Simon tries it.
A long wooden table occupies the center of the room, strewn with papers and books and bottles of ink but in a way that invites new work rather than suggesting work interrupted. Pillows are strewn about on the floor and over a chaise longue. On the chaise longue there is also a black cat. It stands and stretches and jumps down, leaving through the door that Simon has opened.
“You are quite welcome,” he calls after the cat but the cat says nothing and Simon returns his attention to the now catless room.
Along the walls there are five other doors. Each one is marked with a different symbol. Simon closes his door behind him and finds an identical heart on its opposite side. The other doors have a key, a crown, a sword, a bee, and a feather.
Between the doors there are columns, and thin bookshelves suspended from the ceiling like swings, the books stacked flat on their sides. Simon cannot fathom how one might reach the highest shelves until he realizes they are strung on pulleys, able to be raised or lowered.
There are lamps over each door, burning brightly save for the door with the key, which is completely extinguished, and the door with the feather, which has been dimmed.
A piece of paper slides out from under the door with the feather.
Simon picks it up. There is soot on the outside, which blackens his fingers. The words on the paper are written in wobbling, childlike penmanship.
Hello.
Is there someone behind this door
or are you a cat?
There is a drawing of a rabbit beneath.
Simon turns the doorknob. It sticks. He inspects the lock and finds a latch which he turns and then tries again. This time the door submits.
It opens into a dark room with bare walls. No one is there. He looks around the back of the door but sees only darkness.
Confused, Simon closes the door again.
He turns the note over.
He takes a quill from the table, dips it in an inkwell, and writes a response.
I am not a cat.
He folds the paper and slides it under the door. He waits. He opens the door again.
The note is gone.
Simon closes the door.
He turns his attention to a bookcase.
Behind him, the door swings open. Simon cries out in surprise.
In the doorway there is a young woman with brown hair piled in curls and braids around silver filigree bunny ears. She wears a strange knit shirt and a scandalously short skirt over blue trousers and tall boots. Her eyes are bright and wild.
“Who are you?” this girl who has materialized out of nothingness asks. The note is clutched in her hand.
“Simon,” he says. “Who are you?”
The girl considers this question longer, tilting her head, the bunny ears lilting toward the door with the sword.
“Lenore,” Eleanor answers, which is a touch of a lie. She read it in a poem once and thought it prettier than Eleanor, despite the similarity. Besides, no one ever asks h
er name so this seems a good opportunity to try out a new one.
“Where did you come from?” Simon asks.
“The burned place,” she says, as though that is sufficient explanation. “Did you write this?” She holds out the note.
Simon nods.
“When?”
“Moments ago. Was that from you, the message on the other side?” he asks, though he thinks the handwriting looks too juvenile for this to be true, he wonders about the rabbit ears.
Eleanor turns over the note and looks at the awkward letters, the loopy rabbit.
“I wrote this eight years ago,” she says.
“Why would you slip such an old note under the door just now?”
“I put it under the door right after I wrote it. I don’t understand.”
She frowns and closes the door with the feather on it. She walks to the other side of the room. Somewhere in the interim Simon notices that she is quite pretty, despite the eccentricities of her wardrobe. Her eyes are dark, almost black, her skin a light brown, and there is a hint of something foreign to her features. She seems as unlike the girls his aunt sometimes parades by him as it is possible to be. He tries to imagine what she would look like in a gown, and then what she would look like without a gown, and then he coughs, flustered.
She looks at each of the doors in turn.
“I don’t understand,” she says to herself. She turns and looks at Simon again. No, stares at him, scrutinizing him from his hair to his boots. “Are there any bees in here?” she asks him. She starts looking behind the bookshelves and under the pillows.
“Not that I have seen,” Simon tells her, reflexively looking under the table. “There was a cat, earlier, but it departed.”
“How did you get here?” she asks him, catching his eyes from beneath the other side of the table. “Down here, I mean, the place not the room.”
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