Rhyme steps inside and the wall slides back into place behind her, like the wall behind the candle painting.
Zachary goes to look at the wall but he can’t see the door now that it is closed. The carved pattern in the stone is all vines and flowers and bees.
Bees.
Most of the carving is raised but the bees are intaglioed, highly detailed bee-shaped vacancies in the stone.
He tries to remember where Rhyme had pressed the door and finds a single bee.
She must have had a bee to place in it. Like a key.
Maybe this is the acolyte-access-only Archive Mirabel mentioned.
The wall moves again and Zachary ducks behind the statue.
Rhyme comes out from the wall and touches the door again. She does have something in her hand, something small and metallic that Zachary guesses is bee-shaped.
In her other hand is a book.
Rhyme waits for the door to close and then she turns around. She looks over at the statue of the nymph and the satyr and she holds up the book. She puts it down on one of the tables.
Rhyme looks at the statue again, pointedly, then walks away.
Zachary goes to pick up the book. He can’t decide if this turn of events makes him better or worse at following people.
This book is small and gilded. It looks like Sweet Sorrows but bound in dark blue. There are no markings on the cover or the back or any indication as to which is which.
The text inside is handwritten. Zachary thinks at first that it might be a diary but then the first page has a title.
The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor
They cannot stay in this room forever. They know that, but they do not discuss it, distracted by tangled naked limbs and untangling and finding new ways to tangle them again. They find a bottle of wine tucked behind a stack of books but there is no door to the Kitchen here and eventually one of them will have to leave.
The practical worries tug at the buoyancy Simon feels but he pushes them back in his mind as long as he can. He presses his face into Eleanor’s neck and focuses on her, on her skin, the way she smells, the way she laughs, the way she feels beneath him and above him.
They lose track of relative time.
But untracked time leads to problems of hydration and starvation.
“What if we could leave together through one of the other doors?” Eleanor suggests as she pulls on her strangely striped stockings, looking around at the bee and the key and the sword and the crown.
The bee door refuses to budge. The sword door doesn’t have a knob, something Simon had not noticed before. The crown door opens onto a pile of solid stone, the hall beyond it has collapsed. A few stray pebbles roll into the room before Simon closes the door again.
Which leaves only the door with the key.
It is locked but Eleanor uses the metal pieces on her necklace to coerce it open.
Beyond it is a curving hall filled with bookshelves.
“Do you recognize it?” Simon asks.
“I’d have to look around more,” Eleanor says. “A lot of the halls look the same.”
She puts a hand out and nothing stops its passage forward.
“You try,” she suggests and Simon repeats the gesture. Again, nothing prevents his hand from moving from room to hall.
They look at each other. There is nothing else to do. There are no other options.
Simon offers his hand and Eleanor links her fingers in his.
Together they step into the hall.
Eleanor’s fingers vanish within Simon’s own like mist.
The door swings shut behind him with a slam.
“Lenore?” Simon calls but he knows she is gone. He tries the door, a matching key inlayed on this side, and finds it is locked. He knocks but receives no response.
His mind races with options and settles on nothing satisfactory. He decides to try to find his own door, his door with the heart, because that door is unlocked.
Simon traverses mazelike halls and sees nothing familiar for some time. He finds a table laid out with fruit and cheese and biscuits and stops to eat as much as he can and stuffs several biscuits and a plum into the pockets of his coat.
Soon he finds himself back in the Heart.
He knows how to reach the heart-marked door from here and rushes there only to find that its doorknob has been removed. A plug of wood occupies the vacancy its removal has left. The keyhole is similarly filled.
Simon goes back to the Heart.
The door to the Keeper’s office is closed but opens as soon as Simon knocks.
“How may I be of assistance, Mister Keating?” the Keeper asks.
“I need to get into a room,” Simon explains. He sounds out of breath, as though he has been running. Perhaps he was, he does not remember.
“There are a great many rooms here,” the Keeper says. “I must request that you be more specific.”
Simon explains the location of the door, describes the flaming heart upon it.
“Ah,” the Keeper says. “That door. Access to that room is not permitted. My apologies.”
“That door wasn’t locked before,” Simon protests. “I need to get back to Lenore.”
“Who?” the Keeper asks, and now Simon senses that the Keeper understands perfectly well what is going on. He has mentioned Lenore before, when he took Sweet Sorrows home. He doubts the Keeper’s memory is so poor.
“Lenore,” Simon repeats. “She lives down here, she is my height, she has dark hair and brown skin and she wears silver rabbit ears. You must know who I mean. There is no one like her, not anywhere.”
“We have no resident by that name,” the Keeper says, coolly. “I’m afraid you must be confused, young man.”
“I am not confused,” Simon insists, his voice louder than he intended. A cat on a chair in the corner wakes from its nap and glares at him before stretching and jumping down and exiting the office.
The Keeper’s glare is worse than the cat’s.
“Mister Keating, what do you know about time?” he asks.
“Pardon?”
The Keeper adjusts his spectacles and continues.
“I will assume what you know of time is based on how it works above, where it is measurable and relatively uniform. Here, in this office and the places nearest to the anchor in the center of the Heart, time works much the same as it does up there. There are…places…farther and deeper from this location that are less reliable.”
“What does that mean?” Simon asks.
“It means if you encountered someone whom I have no record of it is because they have not been here yet,” the Keeper explains. “In time,” he adds, to clarify.
“That’s absurd.”
“The absurdity of the matter does not make it less true.”
“Let me back in that room, please, sir,” Simon pleads. He does not know what to make of all this talk of time, he wishes only to return to Lenore. “I am begging you.”
“I cannot. I am sorry, Mister Keating, but I cannot. That door has been closed.”
“Unlock it, then.”
“You misunderstand me,” the Keeper says. “It has not been locked, it has been closed. It will no longer open, not for any key. It was a necessary precaution.”
“Then how do I find her again?” Simon asks.
“You may wait,” the Keeper suggests. “It may be a period beyond waiting, I cannot say.”
Simon says nothing. The Keeper sits at his desk and straightens a pile of books. He brushes a layer of blotting powder from his open ledger.
“You may not believe me, Mister Keating, but I understand how you feel,” the Keeper says.
Simon continues to protest and argue with the Keeper but it is the most infuriating type of ar
gument as nothing he says, nothing he does, including kicking chairs and throwing books, has any effect on the Keeper’s impervious calm.
“Nothing can be done,” the Keeper says, repeatedly. He looks as though he dearly wants a cup of tea but does not want to leave Simon to his own devices. “It must have been a rift in time that you stumbled upon. Such things are volatile and must be sealed.”
“I was going into the future?” Simon asks, trying to understand. A clandestine underground library is one thing, traveling through time is another.
“Possibly,” the Keeper answers. “More likely you were both passing through a space that had loosened itself from the bounds of time. A place where time did not exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Keeper sighs.
“Think of time as a river,” he says, drawing a line in the air with his finger. He wears several rings and they glint in the light. “The river flows in one direction. If there is an inlet along that river the water within it does not flow the same way as the rest of the river. The inlet does not follow the same rules. You found an inlet. Sometime, months or perhaps years from now, this girl you speak of finds the same inlet. You both stepped out of the river of time and into another space. A space in which neither of you belonged.”
“Are there other spaces like that? Other inlets, down here?”
“Your line of thinking is not wise. Not in the least.”
“So there is a way to find her, it is possible.”
“I suggest you go home, Mister Keating,” the Keeper says. “Whatever you are seeking here you will not find it.”
Simon scowls. He looks around at the office, at the wooden drawers with their brass handles and the leather chairs with their fancy pillows. There are several compasses on chains in a dish on the desk. His broom, his mother’s broom, rests against the wall by the door. On one pillow a cat is curled up as though it is asleep but it has one eye half open and fixed on him.
“I appreciate the advice, sir,” Simon tells the Keeper. “But I will not be taking it.”
Simon takes one of the compasses from the dish on the desk and turns on his heel, walking briskly but not running, walking deeper into the depths toward the Starless Sea and looking back only once to be certain that the Keeper has not followed him. There is nothing behind him but books and shadows.
Simon consults the compass and continues on, despite the needle insistently pointing him in the opposite direction. He keeps the Heart behind him as he heads out into the unknown.
Out where time is less reliable.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits on a faded leather sofa far below the surface of the earth, at a time that might be very late at night, next to a crackling fireplace, reading.
The book that Rhyme left for him is entirely handwritten. Zachary has only managed a few pages so far. It’s slow, reading a handwritten book. Additionally, he’s not certain what language it is written in. If he unfocuses his eyes the letters jumble into something he doesn’t recognize as a language, which is headache-inducing and frustrating. He puts the book down and moves a lamp so he can see better.
He tries to sort through how this book connects to everything else. He’s certain that the girl who is also a rabbit is the same one that fell through the memory of a door in Sweet Sorrows, and the narrative has just moved out of the Harbor on the Starless Sea to introduce a Keating.
Zachary yawns. If he’s going to read the whole book he’s going to need caffeine.
His normal Kitchen-writing pen has wandered off likely due to cat interference so he looks for another one. There are usually a few on the mantel beneath the bunny pirates. He moves a candle and a paper star and something falls to the ground.
He reaches to pick up the plastic hotel keycard and his hand freezes, midair.
Took you long enough, the voice in his head remarks.
Zachary hesitates, deciding between all the mysteries in need of investigation.
He puts the key in his pocket and leaves the room.
The halls are dim, it must be later than he’d thought. He takes a wrong turn, trying to remember how to reach his destination.
He finds himself in a familiar tiled hall. He stops at a door that practically disappears into the darkness. He stands indecisively in front of it. There is a line of light visible underneath.
Zachary knocks on Dorian’s door once and then again and is about to leave when the door swings open.
Dorian looks at him—no, through him—eyes wide yet tired and Zachary thinks maybe he was asleep but then realizes that he’s fully dressed but badly buttoned and barefoot and there’s a glass of scotch in his hand.
“ ‘You have come to kill me,’ ” Dorian says.
“I—what?” Zachary answers but Dorian continues without pausing, narrating.
“…the Owl King said. ‘I have?’ the sword smith’s daughter asked.”
“Are you really, really drunk right now?” Zachary asks, looking past Dorian at the nearly empty decanter on the desk.
“ ‘They find a way to kill me, always. They have found me here, even in dreams.’ ” Dorian turns back to the room on the word here, the scotch in his glass following a half-second behind and splashing out the side.
“You are really, really drunk right now.”
Zachary follows as Dorian continues telling the story, partly to him and partly to the room in general. Fortunes and Fables sits open on the desk next to the scotch. Zachary glances at it and sees that it is open to the story about the three swords, the illustration of an owl atop a pile of books on a tree stump covered in candles, the illustrator having ignored the part about the beehive.
“ ‘A new king will come to take my place,’ ” Dorian says behind him. “ ‘Go ahead, it is your purpose.’ ”
He holds out the glass and Zachary takes the opportunity to remove it from his hand, placing it on the desk out of harm’s way.
Zachary had secretly wanted another story time with Dorian but this is not what he’d had in mind. He stands and watches and listens, through the decapitation of the owl and the disintegrating crown and despite the peculiarities of the telling and the state of the storyteller it feels real, realer now than when he read the same words on the page. Like it all actually happened once upon a time.
“Then she woke, still in the chair by the fire in her library.”
Dorian punctuates the sentence by collapsing into his own chair by the fire. His head lolls against the back of the armchair and his eyes close and stay closed.
Zachary moves to check on him but as soon as he reaches the chair Dorian leans forward and continues as though the story had not paused at all.
“On the shelf where the sword had been there was a white-and-brown owl perched on the empty case.” Dorian points to a bookshelf behind Zachary and Zachary turns, expecting to see the owl and he does. Amongst the books there is a small painting of an owl with a golden crown hovering above its head.
“The owl remained with her for the rest of her days,” Dorian whispers into Zachary’s ear before he slumps back into the chair.
Even this intoxicated he’s a very good storyteller.
“Who is the Owl King, really?” Zachary asks after the post-story silence.
“Shhh,” Dorian replies, lifting a hand to Zachary’s mouth to shush him. “We can’t know that yet. When we know it will mean we’re at the end of the story.”
His fingers hang on Zachary’s lips for a moment before his hand falls, a moment that tastes of scotch and sweat and turning pages.
Dorian’s head rests on the tall back of the armchair and late-night drunken story time is over.
Zachary takes his cue to leave, pausing at the desk to pick up the almost empty glass of scotch. He drinks what remains, partly so Dorian won’t finish it himself if he wakes since he�
��s probably had enough but mostly because Zachary wants to taste what Dorian has been tasting. Smooth and smoky and a little bit melancholy.
Zachary closes the door as softly as he can, leaving Dorian mostly asleep and possibly dreaming in his chair by the fire in his personal corner of this not quite library, wishing there was a cat around to keep a watchful eye.
Zachary isn’t sure where he’s going even though his destination is set in his mind, or at least it had been when he’d left his room originally, how long ago was that? Story time has confused his sense of actual time. Maybe he wanted company.
When he reaches the Heart it is darker than he’s seen it before, only a few bulbs on the various chandeliers are lit.
The door to the Keeper’s office rests ajar. A slice of light falls into the darkened Heart.
Zachary can hear the voices from inside and it strikes him that he has never overheard a conversation in this place before, or thought that anyone could hear his own conversations for that matter, despite the endless corners and hallways and perfectly placed locations for eavesdropping.
He moves closer because it is the direction he was headed anyway, wondering if unintentional eavesdropping counts as eavesdropping.
“This isn’t going to work.” The Keeper’s voice is low and something is different about it. It has lost the formal edge that it has carried in all of Zachary’s conversations with him.
“You don’t know that,” Mirabel’s voice replies.
“Do you know differently?” the Keeper asks her.
“He has the book,” Mirabel says in response and the Keeper says something else but Zachary cannot hear the reply.
Zachary steps closer to the office, hidden in the shadows, actively listening now. He can see only a sliver of the office, a fragment of shelves and parts of books, the corner of the desk, the tail of the ginger cat. Shadows interrupt the light from the lamps, moving parts of the space from dark to light to dark again. He can make out the Keeper’s voice again.
“You should not have gone there,” he says. “You should not have gotten Allegra involved—”
The Starless Sea Page 26
