The walls are covered with former wallpaper curled up in strips like birch bark. Next to the shelf with the deer is a door with no doorknob and he wonders if it is the same one he passed by earlier.
The room suddenly feels more like a tomb, the scent of burned paper and smoke stronger.
In the hall the lamp falls, either of its own volition or aided by the cat. The bulb breaks with a soft cracking noise and takes the light with it, leaving Zachary alone in the dark with the charred remains of a miniature universe.
He closes his eyes and counts backward from ten.
Something inside him expects to open his eyes and find himself back in Vermont but he is exactly where he was ten seconds earlier, and now he can see a little bit of light, guiding him.
He climbs out of the opening in the wall, careful not to trip on the broken lamp. He replaces it on the table and does his best to push the pieces of broken glass out of the way.
There are a few votive candles tucked into bookshelves and he uses one to relight the taper in its frame. The frame moves back up into place as soon as the candle is lit, the wall closing away the remains of the doll universe again.
“Meow,” the Persian cat says, suddenly at his feet.
“Hey,” Zachary says to the cat. “I’m going to go this way.” He points down the hall to the left, a decision he makes as he vocalizes it. “You can come if you want, if not, no big deal. You do you.”
The cat stares up at him and twitches its tail.
The hall to the left is short and dim and opens into a room surrounded by columns composed of marble statues, figures nakedly supporting the ceiling in twisting combinations of twos and threes, though the statues seem more focused on one another than on their architectural function.
The ceiling is gilded and set with dozens of tiny lights, casting a warm glow over the frozen marble orgy beneath it.
Zachary glances over his shoulder and the cat is following him but when he looks it stops and licks a paw nonchalantly as though it is not following him at all and just happens to be heading in the same direction.
Zachary continues down another hall leading away from the columned room with two more statues beyond. One statue peers into the room and the other turns away, covering its marble eyes.
The cat finds something and bats it around, watching it skitter across the floor. The object loses its appeal quickly, though, and the cat gives it a final bat and continues on its way. Zachary goes to see what the object is and finds an origami star with one bent corner. He puts it in his pocket.
Eventually Zachary finds himself at the Heart, more or less by accident. The door to the Keeper’s office is open but the Keeper doesn’t look up until Zachary knocks on the open door.
“Hello, Mister Rawlins,” he says. “How are you feeling?”
“Better, thank you,” Zachary answers.
“And your friend?”
“He’s asleep but he seems okay. And…I broke a lamp, in one of the halls. I can clean it up if you have a broom or something.” His eyes fall on an old-fashioned twig broom standing in a corner.
“That will not be necessary,” the Keeper says. “I shall have it taken care of. Which hallway?”
“Back that way and around,” Zachary says, indicating the way he came from. “Near a picture frame with a real candle in it.”
“I see,” the Keeper says, writing something down. His tone is just odd enough that Zachary decides to pry, thinking that maybe he’s too polite as a general rule.
“What happened to the dollhouse room?” he asks.
“There was a fire,” the Keeper replies without looking up, seemingly unsurprised that Zachary had found it.
“I’d gathered that,” Zachary says. “What caused it?”
“An accumulation of unforeseen circumstances,” the Keeper says. “An accident,” he adds when Zachary does not immediately respond. “I cannot describe the details of the event because I did not witness it myself. Is there anything else I might help you with?”
“Where is everyone?” Zachary asks, the annoyance obvious in his voice but the Keeper does not look up from his writing.
“You and I are here, your friend is in his room, Rhyme is likely watching him or attending to her duties, and I do not know Mirabel’s current location, she keeps her own counsel.”
“That’s it?” Zachary asks. “There’s five of us and…cats?”
“That is correct, Mister Rawlins,” the Keeper says. “Would you like a number for the cats? It might not be accurate, they are difficult to count.”
“No, that’s okay,” Zachary says. “But where…where’d everyone go?”
The Keeper pauses and looks up at him. He looks older, or sadder, Zachary can’t tell which. Maybe both.
“If you are referring to our former residents, some left. Some died. Some returned to the places that they came from and others sought out new places and I hope that they found them. You are already acquainted with those of us who remain.”
“Why do you remain?” Zachary asks.
“I remain because it is my job, Mister Rawlins. My calling, my duty, my raison d’être. Why are you here?”
Because a book said I was supposed to be, Zachary thinks. Because I’m worried about going back because of crazy ladies in fur coats who keep hands in jars. Because I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet even though I don’t know what the puzzle is.
Because I feel more alive down here than I did up there.
“I’m here to sail the Starless Sea and breathe the haunted air,” he says and the echoed statement earns a smile from the Keeper. He looks younger when he smiles.
“I wish you the best of luck with that,” he says. “Is there anything else I might help you with?”
“The former residents, was one of them named Keating?” Zachary asks.
The Keeper’s expression shifts now to something that Zachary can’t read.
“There have been multiple bearers of that name within these halls.”
“Did…did any of them have a library?” Zachary asks. “Upstairs?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“When were they here?”
“Very long ago, Mister Rawlins. Before your time.”
“Oh,” Zachary says. He tries to think of other questions and doesn’t know what to ask. Sweet Sorrows is in his bag and he could show it to the Keeper but something makes him hesitate. He’s tired, suddenly, and as a candle gutters on the Keeper’s desk the smoke sends his thoughts back to the dollhouse and the destruction of the universe and he thinks maybe he should go lie down or something.
“Are you feeling all right?” the Keeper asks.
“I’m okay,” Zachary says and it tastes like a lie. “Thank you.”
He winds his way through halls that seem darker and emptier. The underground feeling presses on him. So much stone between here and the sky. So much heaviness hanging above his head.
His room feels like a pocket of safety as he reaches it, and as soon as he crosses the threshold he steps on something that has been slipped under his door.
He moves his shoe. Beneath it is a folded piece of paper.
Zachary reaches down and picks it up. There’s a Z on the outside, the fancy sort crossed with a line in the middle. Apparently it’s meant for him.
There are four lines of text inside, in handwriting he doesn’t recognize. It doesn’t seem like a letter or a note. He thinks it might be a fragment of a poem or a story.
Or a puzzle.
The Queen of the Bees has been waiting for you
Tales hidden within to be told
Bring her a key that has never been forged
And another made only of gold
Simon knows it has been hours. He is tired and hungry and recalls that he’d packed food for this purpose an
d left his bag in the cottage and brought a broom instead which now seems impractical. He doesn’t believe Lenore’s claim that so much time had passed but she has not returned and now he is half asleep and her book is quite strange and he is not certain he likes any of this.
He wonders about his mother, that she hid such a place in a cottage in the country.
Reluctantly he follows his compass back to the entrance hall.
He tries to open the door but it is locked.
He tries again, giving the handle an extra push.
“You cannot take that with you,” a voice says behind him. He turns to find the Keeper standing in his doorway, beyond the swinging pendulum. It takes Simon a moment to realize the Keeper refers to the gold-edged book in his hand.
“I wanted to read it,” Simon explains, though it seems obvious. What else would he want to do with a book? Though it is not quite true. He wants to do more than read it. He wants to study it. He wants to savor it. He wants to use it as a window to see inside another person. He wants to take the book into his home, into his life, into his bed because he cannot do the same with the girl who gave it to him.
There must be a formal book-lending process here, he thinks.
“I would like to borrow this book, if I may,” he says.
“You must leave something in its place,” the Keeper tells him.
Simon furrows his brow and then points at the broom still resting by the office door.
“Will that do?”
The Keeper considers the broom and nods.
He goes to the desk and inscribes Simon’s name on a piece of paper and ties it to the broom. The cat on the desk yawns and Simon yawns in response.
“The title of the volume?” the Keeper asks.
Simon looks down at the book, even though he knows the answer.
“Sweet Sorrows,” he replies. “It doesn’t have an author listed here.”
The Keeper looks up at him.
“May I see that?” he asks.
Simon hands him the book.
The Keeper looks it over, studying its binding and endpapers.
“Where did you find this?” he asks.
“Lenore gave it to me,” Simon answers. He assumes he does not need to tell the Keeper who Lenore is, as she is rather memorable. “She said it is her favorite.”
The expression on the Keeper’s face is strange as he hands the book to Simon.
“Thank you,” he says, relieved to have it back.
“Your compass,” the Keeper responds with an open palm, and Simon stares blankly for a second before taking the golden chain from his neck. He almost asks if something is wrong, or about Lenore, or any of his many questions, but none of them will consent to being articulated.
“Good night,” he says instead and the Keeper nods and this time when Simon tries to leave the door opens for him without protest.
He falls asleep standing up in the cage as it ascends, jolted back to half awake when it stops.
The lantern-lit stone room looks the same as before. The door leading back into the cottage is still open.
Moonlight shines through the cottage windows. Simon cannot guess what time it might be. It is cold and he is too tired to light a fire but grateful for his coat.
He collapses on the bed without clearing the books from it, Sweet Sorrows clutched in one hand.
It falls to the floor as he sleeps.
Simon wakes disoriented with book-shaped bruises along his back. He does not remember where he is or how he got here. The morning light peeks in through the gaps in the ivy. A still-open window squeaks on its hinges as the wind tugs at it.
The memory of the key and the cottage and the train seeps back into his cloudy thoughts. He must have fallen asleep. He had the strangest dream.
He tries the door at the back of the cottage but it sticks, probably held shut by the brambles outside.
He builds a fire in the hearth.
He doesn’t know what to do with this space and these books, these things that his mother presumably left for him.
He finds a long, low trunk behind the bed. The lock is rusted shut but so are the hinges and a good kick with the heel of his boot manages to break them both. Inside there are faded papers and more books. One of the documents is the deed to the cottage made out in his name and including a great deal of the surrounding land. He looks through the rest for some missive from his mother, annoyed that she would have anticipated his eighteenth birthday and his finding this place without addressing him personally, and he finds most of the other papers inscrutable: snippets of notes and papers that seem like fairy tales, long rambling things about reincarnation and keys and fate. The only letter is not one from his mother but one written to her, a rather ardent missive signed from someone named Asim. The thought crosses Simon’s mind that this might well be from his father.
He wonders, suddenly, if his mother knew she was going to die. If she was preparing this in anticipation of her absence. It is not a thought he has entertained before and he does not like it.
He has an inheritance. A dusty, book-filled, ivy-infested one. It is something to call his own.
He wonders if he could live here. If he would want to. Perhaps with carpets and better chairs and a proper bed.
He sorts through books and stacks myths and fables on one side of the table, histories and geographies on the other, and leaves volumes he cannot differentiate in the middle. There are books of maps and books written in languages he cannot read. Several are marked with annotations and symbols: crowns and swords and drawings of owls.
He finds a small volume by the bed that is not as dusty as the others and when he recognizes it he drops it again. It falls onto the pile of books, barely distinguishable from the rest.
It was not a dream.
If the book was not a dream, the girl is not a dream.
Simon goes to the back door and pushes it. Shoves it. Throws all his weight into his shoulder to force it open and this time it relents.
Here now is the stair again. The lanterns at the bottom.
The metal cage waiting for him.
The descent is maddeningly slow.
There are no pedestals in the antechamber this time. The door allows him entrance without question.
The Keeper’s office is closed and Simon hears the door open as he heads down a corridor but he does not look behind him.
It is difficult to locate the door with the heart again without his compass. He takes wrong turns and doubles back again and again. He climbs stairs made of books.
Finally he finds a familiar turn, and then the shadowed nook and the door with its burning heart.
The room beyond it is empty.
He tries the door with the feather but it insists on opening into nothingness. He closes the door again.
She could return at any moment.
She might never return.
Simon paces around the table. When he tires of pacing he sits on the chaise longue, first angling it so he can face the door. He wonders how long that cat had waited in this room for someone to open a door to release it and how it was left inside in the first place.
He tires of sitting and goes back to pacing.
He picks up a quill from the table and considers writing a letter and slipping it under the door.
He wonders what to write that would be of any use. He thinks he understands now why his mother did not leave him any letters. He cannot even tell Lenore what time or day he was here waiting as he does not have available measurements for time. He realizes how difficult it is to determine the passage of time without sunlight.
He puts the quill down.
He wonders how long is an appropriate time to wait for a girl who may or may not have been a dream. Wonders if h
e could have dreamed a girl in a real place or if the place is a dream and then his head hurts so he thinks perhaps he should find something to read instead of continuing to think.
He regrets leaving Sweet Sorrows in the cottage. He looks through the books on their shelves. Many are unfamiliar and strange. A heavy volume with footnotes and a raven on its cover pulls his attention more than the others, and he finds himself so drawn into its tale of two magicians in England that he loses track of time.
Then the door with the feather opens, and she is here.
Simon puts the book down. He does not wait for her to say anything. He cannot wait, he is too afraid that she will vanish again and never reappear. He closes the distance between them as quickly as he can and then he kisses her desperately, hungrily, and after a moment she kisses him back in equal measure.
Kissing, Eleanor thinks, is not done any justice in books.
They peel off each other’s clothes in layers. He curses at the strange clasps and fasteners on her garments while she laughs at the sheer number of buttons on his.
He leaves her bunny ears on.
It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. In one person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric.
But doors cannot stay closed forever.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS stands in front of a statue of a woman covered in bees wondering if it takes a crown to make a queen.
This is the only identity he can think of for the Queen of the Bees from his newfound quest (Is this a side quest or a main quest? the voice in his head ponders) but he doesn’t know how to give her keys. He searched the marble statue for keyholes and found nothing but cracks, not that he has keys to give. He’s stuck on the never-been-forged part and he’s not sure where to find a gold key. Maybe he should sort through all the jars in the Keeper’s office, or find the room with the keys from Sweet Sorrows and he realizes the keys in the jars might be those same keys, put into storage.
The Starless Sea Page 24
