The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  He has inspected every bee, investigated the entire marble chair the woman sits upon, and found nothing. Maybe there’s another woman somewhere who rules the bees. The bees aren’t even part of the statue, they’re carved from a different stone in a warmer appropriate honey color and they’re movable. They all might belong somewhere else. Some of them have moved since the first time Zachary saw this statue.

  Zachary places a single bee on each of the woman’s open palms and leaves her alone to think whatever thoughts statues think when they are alone underground and covered with bees.

  He chooses a new-to-him hall, pausing at a contraption that looks like a large old-fashioned gumball machine filled with metallic orbs of various shades. Zachary turns the ornate handle and the machine dispenses a copper sphere. It is heavier than it looks and once Zachary figures out how to open it he finds a tiny scroll tucked inside that unfurls like ticker tape with a surprisingly long tale written upon it about lost loves and castles and crossed destinies.

  Zachary tucks the empty copper ball and the now tangled story in his bag and continues along the hall until he reaches a large staircase that leads down to an expansive space. A massive ballroom, utterly empty. Zachary tries to imagine how many people it would take to fill it with dancers and revelry. It is taller than the Heart, its soaring ceilings disappearing into shadows that could be mistaken for night sky. Fireplaces line the walls, one of them lit and the rest of the light comes from lanterns hanging from chains strung along the walls. He wonders if Rhyme lights them in case someone passes through the room, or in case someone wants to dance, or if they light themselves, in giddy flaming anticipation.

  As he walks across the ballroom, Zachary feels more acutely that he has missed something. He has arrived too late, the party is over. If he had opened that painted door so long ago would he already have been too late then? Probably.

  There is a door on the far wall, past the fireplaces and beyond a stretch of dark open archways. Zachary opens the door and finds someone else in the midst of the post-party emptiness.

  Mirabel is curled up amongst racks filled with bottles, up in a window-like nook on a wall with no window in a wine cellar with more than enough wine for all the parties that are not occurring in the ballroom. She wears a long-sleeved black dress that could probably be described as slinky if it wasn’t so voluminous. It obscures her legs and the stacks of wine below her and part of the floor. She has a glass of sparkling wine in one hand and her nose is buried in a book and as Zachary gets closer he can read the cover: A Wrinkle in Time.

  “I was annoyed about not remembering the tesseract technicalities,” Mirabel says without looking up or clarifying any specifics regarding space or time. “You may be interested in knowing that the damage due to an electrical fire in the basement of a private club in Manhattan was extensive but controlled and did not spread to neighboring buildings. They might not even have to tear it down.”

  She rests her book on a nearby wine bottle, open to keep her page marked, and looks down at him.

  “The building was, reportedly, unoccupied at the time,” she continues. “I’d like to know where Allegra is before I take you back up, if that’s all right with you.”

  Zachary thinks it likely doesn’t matter whether or not it is all right with him, and again finds himself in no great hurry to return to the surface.

  “Who’s the Queen of the Bees?” he asks.

  Mirabel looks at him quizzically enough for him to be certain that she didn’t write the note, but then she shrugs her shoulders and points behind him.

  Zachary turns. There are long wooden tables with benches tucked amongst the racks of wine, and other window-like nooks in the stone walls, the largest of which holds the massive painting that Mirabel is pointing at.

  It is a portrait of a woman in a low-cut, wine-red gown holding a pomegranate in one hand and a sword in the other. The background is a textured darkness with the light coming from the figure herself. It reminds Zachary of a Rembrandt painting, the way she glows within the shadows. The woman’s face is entirely obscured by a swarm of bees. A few of the bees have wandered downward to investigate the pomegranate.

  “Who is she?” Zachary asks.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Mirabel says. “It has rather heavy Persephone overtones.”

  “Queen of the Underworld,” Zachary says, staring at the painting, trying to figure out how to give it keys and failing. He wishes the pomegranate had a keyhole painted into it, that would be whimsical and appropriate.

  “You’re well-read, Ezra,” Mirabel remarks, sliding down from her perch.

  “I’m well-mythed,” Zachary corrects. “When I was a kid I thought Hecate and Isis and all the orishas were friends of my mom’s, like, actual people. I suppose in a way they were. Still are. Whatever.”

  Mirabel lifts an open bottle of champagne from an ice bucket on one of the tables. She holds it up and offers it to Zachary.

  “I’m more of a cocktail guy,” he says, though he is also of the opinion that sparkling wine is an anytime beverage and appreciates Mirabel’s style.

  “What’s your poison?” she asks as she refills her glass. “I owe you a drink, and a dance, and other things, I’m sure.”

  “Sidecar, no sugar,” Zachary replies, distracted by the deck of cards sitting next to the champagne.

  Mirabel slinks over to the wall on the other side of the painting, her gown following behind. She taps a part of the wall that opens, revealing a hidden dumbwaiter.

  Zachary returns his attention to the cards.

  “Are these yours?” he asks.

  “I shuffle them compulsively more than I read them,” she says. “I’m surprised there aren’t more down here, they’re basically stories in pieces that can be rearranged.”

  Zachary flips a card, expecting a familiar tarot archetype but the image on the card is a strange one: a black-and-white anatomical sketch surrounded by a swirl of watercolor blood.

  The Lung

  The title is appropriate for the illustration: a single lung, not a pair. The watercolor blood looks like it is moving, swirling into the lung and out again.

  Zachary puts the card back on top of the pile.

  A chime sounds from the door on the wall, startling him.

  “Does your mother read cards?” Mirabel asks as she hands him a chilled coupe glass, its rim distinctly un-sugared.

  “Sometimes,” Zachary says. “People tend to expect it so she’ll lay out some cards when she reads but she mostly holds objects and gets impressions from them. It’s called psychometry.”

  “She measures souls.”

  “I guess so, if you’re into direct translations.” Zachary takes a sip of his sidecar. It is quite possibly the most perfect sidecar that he has ever tasted and he wonders how perfection can be so disconcerting.

  “The Kitchen is an excellent mixologist,” Mirabel says in reply to his litany of facial expressions. “As I was saying, we should lay low. Pun not entirely intended. Don’t tell me you can’t find anything to occupy yourself with, or anyone for that matter.” Mirabel continues before Zachary can protest the statement, “To think if you’d picked up a different library book you wouldn’t be here right now. I’m sorry you lost it.”

  “Oh,” Zachary says, “I had it the whole time. Dorian had put it in my coat.” He takes Sweet Sorrows from his bag and hands it to Mirabel. “Do you know where it came from?”

  “It could be one of the books from the Archive,” she says, flipping through the pages. “I’m not certain, only acolytes are allowed in the Archive. Rhyme would know more but she probably won’t tell you, she takes her vows seriously.”

  “Who wrote it?” Zachary asks. “Why am I in it?”

  “If it is from the Archive it was written down here. I’ve heard that the records kept in the Archive aren’t exactly chronologic
al. Someone must have removed it and brought it topside. That might be why Allegra was looking for it, she likes keeping things locked up.”

  “Is that what she’s doing, trying to keep it locked up?”

  “She thinks locking it away will keep it safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Zachary asks.

  Mirabel shrugs. “People? Progress? Time? I don’t know. She might have succeeded if it wasn’t for me. There were only real doors once upon a time and she’d closed so many before I figured out that I could paint new ones and now she tries to close those, too. Close it away and keep it from harm.”

  “She talked a lot about eggs and keeping them from breaking.”

  “If an egg breaks it becomes more than it was,” Mirabel says, after considering the matter. “And what is an egg, if not something waiting to be broken?”

  “I think the egg was a metaphor.”

  “Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few metaphors,” Mirabel says. She closes Sweet Sorrows and hands it back to Zachary. “If it does belong in the Archive I don’t think Rhyme would mind if you kept it, as long as it stays down here.”

  As she turns to refill her wineglass Zachary notices an addition to the numerous chains around her neck.

  A layered series of chains with a gold sword much like the one around his own neck, accompanied by a key and a bee.

  “Is that necklace gold?” Zachary asks, pointing. Mirabel looks at him curiously and then glances down at the key.

  “I think so. It’s gold-plated, at least.”

  “Did you wear it to the party last year?”

  “I did, you reminded me with your origin story in the elevator. I’m glad it was useful. Useful jewelry is the best kind of jewelry.”

  “Can…can I borrow the key?”

  “You don’t have enough jewelry already?” Mirabel says, looking at his compass and his keys and Dorian’s sword hanging like a talisman.

  “Look who’s talking.”

  Mirabel narrows her eyes and sips her wine but then she reaches behind her neck to undo the clasp. She untangles the chain with the key from the rest of her neckwear and hands it to him.

  “Don’t melt it down,” she says, letting it drop into his open palm.

  “Of course not. I’ll bring it back.”

  Zachary puts the necklace in his bag.

  “What are you up to, Ezra?” Mirabel asks and he almost tells her but something stops him.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he says. “I’ll let you know if I find out.”

  “Please do,” Mirabel says with a curious smile.

  Zachary picks up her glass of wine from the table and takes a sip of it. It tastes like winter sun and melting snow, bubbles bright and sharp and bursting.

  There is a story here for each bubble in each bottle, in every glass in every sip.

  And when the wine is gone the stories will remain.

  Zachary isn’t certain if the voice is the normal voice in his head or another voice entirely, if maybe Mirabel’s wine is made of stories like her weird tin filled with not-mints.

  He isn’t certain about anything.

  He isn’t even certain that he minds not being certain about anything.

  He downs the rest of his sidecar to wash the story voices away and when it settles there is a question on his tongue instead.

  “Max, where’s the sea?”

  “The what?”

  “The sea. The Starless Sea, the body of water on which this place is a Harbor.”

  “Oh,” Mirabel says, frowning into her fizzing glass. Zachary waits for her to tell him that the Starless Sea is a bedtime story for children or that the Starless Sea is a state of mind or that there is no Starless Sea at all and there never was but she doesn’t. She stands and says, “This way.” She plucks the champagne bottle from the table and walks out of the wine cellar and into the ballroom.

  Zachary follows, leaving his empty glass next to a deck of cards that would tell him the whole story if he laid them out in the proper order.

  Mirabel leads him through the shadowed arches near the door to the wine cellar that are so dark Zachary had not noticed the stairs beyond them. He cannot see more than an arm’s length in front of him as they descend. He stays two stairs behind Mirabel in order not to step on the hem of her gown and even in that two-stair distance she practically vanishes into the shadows.

  “How far down is it?” he starts to ask but the darkness takes the word How and volleys it back to him: How how how how how.

  The darkness, he understands now, is very, very large.

  The stairs terminate at a long low wall carved into the rock, short columns rising from the raw stone floor.

  Zachary glances back up the stairs where six archways of light stare out into the dark.

  “So you wish to see the sea,” Mirabel singsongs, looking out over the wall into the darkness, and Zachary cannot tell if she is talking to him or to herself or to the darkness that he assumes is a cave. The cave answers: See see sea sea sea.

  “Where is it?” Zachary asks.

  Mirabel steps closer to the stone wall and looks over. Zachary stands next to her and looks down.

  The light from the ballroom catches an expanse of raw stone before the rock tapers off into nothingness and shadow. Zachary can just make out his silhouette on the stone alongside Mirabel’s but the light doesn’t reach anything resembling water or waves.

  “How far down is it?”

  In response to this question Mirabel takes the champagne bottle and tosses it into the darkness. Zachary waits for it to crash against the rock or splash into the sea he doesn’t believe is there but it does neither. He keeps waiting. And waiting.

  Mirabel sips her wine.

  After a time that would be more appropriately measured in minutes than seconds there is the softest sound far, far below, so far that Zachary cannot tell if the sound is breaking glass or not. The echo picks it up halfheartedly and carries it partway back as though the effort is too great to bring such a small sound so far.

  “The Starless Sea,” Mirabel says, gesturing with her glass both at the abyss below and the darkness above, devoid of stars.

  Zachary stares out into the nothingness, not knowing what to say.

  “These used to be the beaches,” Mirabel tells him. “People would dance in the surf during the parties.”

  “What happened?”

  “It receded.”

  “Is…is that why people left or did it recede because people left?”

  “Neither. Both. You could try to point out a single moment that started the exodus but I think it was just time. The old doors were crumbling long before Allegra and company started tearing them down and displaying doorknobs like hunting trophies. Places change. People change.”

  She takes another sip of her wine and Zachary wonders if she’s thinking of someone in particular but he doesn’t ask.

  “It’s not what it was,” Mirabel continues. “Please don’t feel bad about missing the heyday, the heyday was over and the tide was out long before I was born.”

  “But the book—” Zachary begins not knowing quite what he’s going to say and then Mirabel cuts him off.

  “A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,” she places her hand on the wall in front of them. The stone is cracked near her fingers, a fissure running down the side and disappearing into a column. “You could write endless pages but the words will never be the place. Besides, that’s what it was. Not what it is.”

  “It could be that again, couldn’t it?” Zachary asks. “If we fixed the doors, people would come.”

  “I appreciate that we, Ezra,”
Mirabel says. “But I’ve been doing this for years. People come but they don’t stay. The only one who ever stayed is Rhyme.”

  “The Keeper said all of the old residents left or died.”

  “Or disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Zachary repeats and the cavern around them echoes his echo, breaking the word into fragments and picking its favorite: Appear, appear, appear.

  “Do me a favor, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “Don’t wander too far down.”

  She turns and kisses him on the cheek and walks up the stairs.

  Zachary takes one last look into the darkness and then follows her.

  He knows their conversation is over before he reaches the top, but she gives him a little parting tip of her empty glass when he walks past and continues across the expansive ballroom.

  He can feel her watching as he goes and he doesn’t turn around. He does a little pirouette in the middle of the empty dance floor and he hears her laugh as he continues on.

  Everything feels okay, suddenly, even in the ballroom emptiness and the crackling of one fire that should be a dozen.

  Maybe everything is burning, has burned, will burn.

  Maybe he shouldn’t drink things down here, as a general rule.

  Maybe, he thinks as he ascends the stairs at the far end of the ballroom, there are more mysteries and more puzzles down here than he can ever hope to solve.

  As Zachary reaches the top of the stairs a shadow passes by the end of the hall and he can tell by the hair that it’s Rhyme. He tries to catch up but she manages to stay ahead of him.

  He watches as she dims some lamps and ignores others.

  Curious both in general and about where Rhyme goes when she’s not floating through the halls lighting candles, Zachary continues to follow her from a good distance.

  He follows her down a hall filled with delicate carvings and large statues as she lights candles held out toward her by marble hands.

  Rhyme stops abruptly and Zachary steps back into a shadowed alcove, tucked behind a life-size statue of a satyr and a nymph frozen in an impressively acrobatic embrace. He can see Rhyme through a window of thigh and arm. She’s stopped in front of a carved stone wall. She reaches up and presses something against it and the wall slides open.