“Through a door, in a cottage—”
“You have a door?” Eleanor asks. She sits on the floor amongst the chairs, cross-legged, looking at him expectantly.
“It is not mine, precisely,” Simon clarifies. Though he supposes it is, if the cottage is his. A strange inheritance. He sits as well, pushing a chair out of the way, so they are facing each other in a forest of chair legs with a table canopy.
“I thought most of the doors were gone,” Eleanor confides.
Simon tells her about his mother, about the envelope and the key and the cottage. She listens intently and he adds as much detail as he can think to. The wax seal on the envelope. The ivy on the cottage. She wears a curious expression as he describes the cagelike elevator but does not interrupt.
“Your mother was here?” Eleanor asks when he has brought the story through the door and into the room in which they now sit.
“Apparently.” Simon thinks this might be better than a letter, to have spaces she occupied and books she read.
“What did she look like?” Eleanor asks.
“I don’t remember,” Simon answers, and suddenly wishes to change the subject. “I have never met a girl who wears trousers before,” he says, hoping she does not take offense.
“I can’t climb things in a dress,” Eleanor explains, as though stating a simple fact.
“Climbing is not for girls.”
“Anything is for girls.”
Her expression is so serious it makes him consider the statement. It runs counter to everything his uncle says about girls but he thinks perhaps his uncle does not know as much about girls as he lets on, and his aunt has very particular ideas about what constitutes ladylike.
He wonders if he has stumbled upon a place where girls do not play games, where there are not unspoken rules to follow. No expectations. No chaperones. He wonders if his mother was like that. Wonders what makes a woman a witch.
They continue volleying questions and answers back and forth, sometimes so many at once it is like juggling to answer one and then another and more in between. Simon tells her things he has never told anyone. He confides fears and exposes worries, thoughts falling from his lips that he dared not speak aloud but it is different here, with her.
She tells him about the place. About the books and the rooms and the cats. She has a tiny jar of honey in her bag and she lets him taste it. He expects sweetness but it is more than that, rich and golden and smoky.
Simon is lost for words, licking honey from his fingers, thinking thoughts he cannot express and is certain would be inappropriate if he could.
Eleanor does not know what to make of this boy with his frilly shirt and buttoned jacket. Is he a boy or a man? She is not sure how to tell the difference. He pronounces his r’s strangely. She is not certain if he is handsome, she has little reference for such things, but she likes his face. There is an openness in it. She wonders if he has no secrets. He has brown eyes but his hair is blond, she has read so many books where blond hair goes with blue eyes that she finds it incongruous. His face is so much more than hair and eye color, she wonders why books do not describe the curves of noses or the length of eyelashes. She studies the shape of his lips. Perhaps a face is too complicated to capture in words.
Eleanor reaches out and touches his hair. He looks so surprised that she pulls her hand back.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s all right.” Simon reaches out and takes her hand in his. His fingers are warm and honey-sticky. Her heart is beating too fast. She tries to remember books with boys in frilly shirts to guess at how she is meant to behave. All she can remember is dancing, which seems inappropriate, and embroidery, which she does not know how to do. She probably shouldn’t be staring but he is staring back so she does not stop.
They continue to talk, sitting hand in hand. Eleanor traces tiny circles in his palm with her fingertips as they discuss the Harbor, the hallways, the rooms, the cats.
The books.
“Do you have a particular favorite?” Simon asks.
Eleanor considers this. It is not a question she has ever been asked, but a book comes to mind.
“I do. I…I do. It’s…” Eleanor pauses. “Would you like to read it?” she asks instead of trying to explain it. Books are always better when read rather than explained.
“I would, very much so,” Simon answers.
“I can get it and you can read it and then we could talk about it. If you like it. Or if you don’t, I would want to know why, exactly. It’s in my room, would you come with me?”
“Of course.”
Eleanor opens the door with the feather on it.
“I’m sorry it’s so dark,” she says. She takes a metal rod from her bag and presses something that makes it glow brightly, steady and white. She shines it into the darkness and Simon can see the crumbling remains of the room, the burned books. There is a scent like smoke.
Eleanor steps out of one room and into the other.
Simon follows and walks directly into a wall. When the stars behind his eyes from the impact clear he looks out at the darkness he had seen before, the burned room and the girl both gone.
Simon pushes against the darkness but it is solid.
He knocks upon it, as though the darkness were a door.
“Lenore?” he calls.
She will come back, he tells himself. She will fetch the book and return. If he cannot follow, he can wait.
He closes the door and rubs his forehead.
He turns his attention to the bookshelves. He recognizes volumes by Keats and Dante but the other names are unfamiliar. His thoughts keep returning to the girl.
He runs his fingers over the velvet pillows piled on the chaise longue.
The door with the feather opens and Eleanor enters, a book in her hand. She has changed her clothing, she wears a dark blue shirt that drapes over her shoulders with a long pink scarf looped around her neck.
When her eyes meet his, she starts, the door swinging shut behind her. She stares at him, wide-eyed.
“What happened?” Simon asks.
“How long was I gone?” she asks.
“A moment?” Simon had not thought to measure the time, distracted by his thoughts. “No more than ten minutes, surely.”
Eleanor drops the book and it falls, fluttering open and then closing again on the ground near her feet. Her hands fly to her face and cover her mouth and Simon, at a loss for what to do, retrieves the book, looking curiously at its gilded cover.
“Whatever is the matter?” he asks. He resists the urge to flip through the pages though the temptation is there.
“Six months,” Eleanor says. Simon does not understand. He raises an eyebrow and Eleanor scowls in frustration. “Six months,” she repeats, louder this time. “Six months this room has been empty every time I’ve opened that door and today here you are again.”
Simon laughs, despite her seriousness.
“That’s absurd,” he says.
“It’s true.”
“It’s nonsense,” Simon declares. “You’re playing at something. One does not simply disappear for moments and claim to be vanished for months on end. Here, I’ll show you.”
Simon turns to the door with the heart and steps into the hallway, book in hand.
“Come and see,” he says, turning back to the room, but it is empty. “Lenore?”
Simon steps into the room but there is no one. He looks at the book in his hands. He closes the door and opens it again.
He could not have imagined a girl.
Besides, if there was no girl, where did the book come from?
He turns it over in his hands.
He reads because the reading soothes his nerves.
He waits for the d
oor to open again, but it does not.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS finds Sweet Sorrows exactly where Dorian said it would be, inside the pocket of his paint-splattered coat, thrown over the back of a chair in his room where he had left it after he arrived.
He didn’t even notice. The book is small enough to be slipped into the pocket of a coat without its wearer noticing, especially if said wearer were cold and confused and intoxicated. Zachary feels he should remember. The missed intimacy annoys him.
It’s the first chance he’s had to check, returning to his room after who knows how many hours watching Dorian though he didn’t say another word while Zachary sat and read his book of fairy tales, growing more confused by mentions of the Starless Sea and what seemed like several different Owl Kings. Rhyme relieved him from his watch but he couldn’t follow her explanation of where Mirabel had gone and he now thinks he should have asked her to write it down and wonders if that’s allowed.
His own room feels comfortable and familiar, the fire burning merrily again. He thinks maybe the bed has been made but it’s so fluffy it’s difficult to tell. The Kitchen has sent back his clothes, including his suit, folded and spotless.
He sends his forgotten coat down to see if they can help with that and decides he should probably eat something.
Moments later the bell dings and he finds the Kitchen has taken his request for “all the dumplings” literally but the assortment proves as delicious as it is intimidatingly vast. Single dumplings in countless varieties are presented on individual covered dishes, some accompanied by dipping sauces. Each ceramic cover has a painted scene: a figure going on a journey, the same simple figure repeated on each piece surrounded by a different environment. A forest full of birds. A mountaintop. A nighttime city.
Zachary cannot manage to visit even half of the dumpling destinations so he leaves the rest covered, hoping they will maintain their respective temperatures.
He starts a collection of the blue glass sparkling water bottles along a shelf. Maybe he can find candles to put in them. He’s not opposed to making himself comfortable. He’s already comfortable. The kind of comfortable that involves occasionally lying on the bathroom tile and reminding oneself to breathe.
With his bag back he has his own clothes again but they are not as nice as the clothing from the room. Even comparing his regular glasses against the borrowed ones gives a slight advantage to the newer pair, so Zachary continues wearing them as well.
He finds an electrical outlet by one of the lamps and plugs in his phone, though the effort feels futile.
He sits by the fire and pages through Sweet Sorrows again, relieved to be reunited with it. There are more missing pages than he remembers. Maybe he should show the book to Mirabel. He pauses at the bit about the son of the fortune-teller. Not yet. Well, he’s here now. He’s made it to the Harbor even if he hasn’t found the Starless Sea. Now what?
Maybe he could trace the book backward. Where was it before? He remembers his long-ago library clue. From the library of…somebody. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the piece of paper Elena gave him after Kat’s class, donated by…something foundation…dammit. There was a J, he thinks. Maybe.
Keating. The name comes back to him but he can’t remember the initials. He can’t believe he forgot to bring the piece of paper along.
One thing is certain: He’s not going to find his next move here unless his next move is a nap.
Zachary tucks Sweet Sorrows in his bag, sends his dishes back to the Kitchen and asks for an apple (it sends a silver bowl filled with yellow apples touched with spots of soft blushing pink), and sets off into the wilds of the Harbor again.
He tries not to use his compass but he has no idea what direction he’s moving in at any given time. He finds a room filled with tables and armchairs, some set in individual alcoves around the room and a large empty space with more chairs and a cascading fountain in the middle.
In the bottom of the fountain there are coins, some he recognizes and others are unfamiliar, piles of wishes resting under softly bubbling water. He thinks of the fountain full of keys and the key collector from Dorian’s book and wonders what happened to him.
No one ever saw him again.
He wonders if anyone is wondering what happened to him yet. Probably not.
Beyond the fountain is a hall with a lower ceiling, its entrance obscured by a bookshelf and an armchair. He has to move the chair to proceed. The hall is dimly lit with closed doors and as Zachary walks he realizes what is strange about it. It is not the relative lack of books or cats, rather that the doors along the hall have no doorknobs, no handles. Only locks. He pauses at one and pushes but it doesn’t budge. A closer inspection of the wood around the door reveals streaks of black char along the edges. There’s a hint of smoke in the air, like a long-extinguished fire. There’s a spot on the door where the doorknob had been, a vacancy that has been plugged with a piece of newer, unburned wood. Something moves in the shadows at the other end of the hall again, too big to be a cat, but when he looks there’s nothing there.
Zachary walks back the way he came, toward the fountain, and chooses a different hall. It is more brightly lit but “brightly” is a comparative term here. Most of the space has light enough to read by and little more.
He wanders aimlessly, avoiding going back to check on Dorian and mildly annoyed that so much of his mind is occupied by thinking about it (him).
He passes a painting of a candle and he could swear it flickers as he goes by so he investigates and it is not a painting at all but a frame hung on the wall around a shelf, a candle in a silver candlestick set inside and flickering. He wonders who lit it.
A meow behind him interrupts his wondering. Zachary turns to find a Persian cat staring at him, its squished face contorted in a skeptical glare.
“What’s your problem?” he asks the cat.
“Meooorwrrrorr,” the cat says in a hybrid meow-growl implying that it has so many problems it does not even know where to begin.
“I hear you,” Zachary says. He looks back at the candle, dancing in its frame.
He blows it out.
Immediately, the picture frame shudders and moves downward. The whole wall is moving, from the picture frame down, sinking into the floor. It stops when the bottom of the frame reaches the tiled ground, the extinguished candle halting at cat-eye level.
In the vacancy where the frame had been is a rectangular hole in the wall. Zachary looks down at the cat who is more interested in the candle, batting at a curl of smoke.
The opening is large enough for Zachary to step through but there’s not enough light. Most of the light here comes from a fringed lamp on a table across the hall. Zachary pulls the lamp as close to the newfound hole in the wall as its cord will allow, wondering how the electricity works down here and what happens if it goes out.
The lamp consents to coming close to the opening but not all the way in. Zachary rests it on the floor and leans it—the fringe delighting the cat—so it tilts toward the opening. He steps over the not-painting and inside.
His shoes crunch on things on the floor that are known only to the darkness and Zachary thinks maybe it’s better that way. The lamp is doing an admirable job of illuminating but it takes his eyes awhile to adjust. He pushes his borrowed glasses up closer to the bridge of his nose.
He realizes that the room is not getting brighter because everything within it is burned. What he’d guessed to be dust is ash, settled over the remains of what was, and Zachary recognizes precisely what was, before, some indeterminable amount of time before he arrived.
The desk in the center of the room and the dollhouse atop it have been burned into blackness and rubble.
The dollhouse has collapsed onto itself, the roof caving into the space below. Its inhabitants and surroundings have been incinerated and left to memories. The entire room is filled
with charred paper and objects burned beyond recognition.
Zachary reaches up to touch a single star suspended on a somehow intact string from the ceiling and it falls to the floor, lost amongst the shadows.
“Even tiny empires fall,” Zachary says, partly to himself and partly to the cat who peers over the top of the picture frame from the hall.
In response, the cat drops out of sight.
Zachary’s shoes crunch over burned wood and broken bits of a world that was. He walks toward the dollhouse. The hinge that once opened the house like a door is intact and he unlatches it, the hinge breaking with the movement and the facade falling onto the table, leaving the interior exposed.
It is not as thoroughly destroyed as the rest of the room but it is burned and blackened. Bedrooms are indistinguishable from living rooms or the kitchen. The attic has fallen into the floor below and taken most of the roof along with it.
Zachary spots something in one of the burned rooms. He reaches in and lifts it from the ruins.
A single doll. He wipes the soot from it with his sweater and holds it up to the light. It’s a girl doll, maybe the daughter of the original doll family, painted and porcelain. Cracked, but not broken.
Zachary leaves her standing upright in the ashes of the house.
He’d wanted to see it as it was. The house and the town and the city across the sea. The multitude of additions and overlapping narratives. He’d wanted to add something to it, maybe. To make his own mark on the story. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted to until faced with the reality that he cannot. He can’t decide if he’s sad or angry or disappointed.
Time passes. Things change.
He looks around the room, the larger room that now houses a single girl standing in the ashes of her world. There are strings where stars or planets may once have hung from the ceiling, little wisps like spiderwebs. He can see now that there is more that has survived whatever conflagration consumed the room. A shipwreck in one corner that was once an ocean, a length of train track along the side of the table, a grandfather clock falling from the window of the main house, and a deer, black from its hooves to its tiny antlers but intact, watching him from a shelf with glassy pinprick eyes.
The Starless Sea Page 23
