The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  “Allegra was already involved,” Mirabel interrupts. “Allegra’s been involved ever since she started closing off doors and possibilities along with them. We’re so close—”

  “All the more reason not to provoke her.”

  “There wasn’t another way. We needed him, we needed that”—Zachary can see part of Mirabel’s arm move as she indicates something across the room but he cannot see what—“and the book has been returned. You’ve given up, haven’t you?”

  The pause goes on so long that Zachary wonders if the office has another door that Mirabel might have left through but then the Keeper’s voice breaks the silence, his tone changed, his voice lower.

  “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  Surprised, Zachary moves and his sliver of visible room fragment shifts.

  The curve of Mirabel’s back as she sits on the corner of the desk, facing away from him. The Keeper standing, his hand reaching out and sliding over her neck and shoulder, slipping the sleeve of her dress down as he moves closer, brushing his lips against the newly bared skin.

  “Maybe this time will be different,” Mirabel says softly.

  The ginger cat meows in the direction of the door and Zachary turns away and walks quickly down the closest hall, continuing until he’s certain no one has followed, wondering at how easy it is to miss things even when they’re happening right in front of you.

  He turns and looks over his shoulder and there in the middle of the hallway is his squish-faced Persian friend.

  “Do you want to keep me company?” Zachary asks and the request sounds sad. Part of him wants to go back to his own bed and part of him wants to go curl up in a chair next to Dorian and another part of him doesn’t know what he wants.

  The Persian cat stretches and approaches and stops by Zachary’s feet. It looks up at him expectantly.

  “Okay then,” Zachary says and with the cat by his side he winds his way through halls and rooms filled with other people’s stories until they reach the garden filled with sculptures.

  “I think I figured it out,” Zachary tells the cat. The cat does not reply, preoccupied with the inspection of a statue of a fox about its own size frozen mid-leap, its multiple tails sweeping down along the ground.

  Zachary turns his attention to a different statue.

  He stands in front of the seated woman with her multitude of bees and wonders who sculpted her. Wonders how many corners of this place her bees have wandered off to, placed in pockets or assisted in their journeys by cats.

  He wonders if anyone ever looked at her and thought she wanted something other than a book in her open palms.

  Wonders if she ever had a crown.

  Wonders who left her that glass of wine.

  Zachary places the golden key from Mirabel’s necklace in the statue’s right hand.

  He puts his plastic hotel key card in her left hand.

  Nothing happens.

  Zachary sighs.

  He is about to ask the cat if it is hungry and is questioning how firm the “don’t feed the cats” rule might be when the buzzing starts.

  It comes from within the statue. A buzzing, humming sound.

  The woman’s stone fingers begin to move, curling closed over the keys. A single bee tumbles from her arm and onto the floor.

  There is a scraping sound, followed by a heavy mechanical thunk.

  But the statue, keys clasped in her hands, does not move again.

  Zachary reaches out and touches her hand. It is closed around the key as though it had been carved that way.

  Nothing else has changed, but there was the noise.

  Zachary walks around the statue.

  The back of the stone chair has slid down into the floor.

  The statue is hollow.

  There’s a staircase below her.

  At the bottom of the stairs there is a light.

  Zachary looks back at the cat sitting beneath the feet of the hovering marble fox, curled in a multitude of tails. The only tail that twitches is the cat’s.

  The cat meows at him.

  Maybe all moments have meaning.

  Somewhere.

  Zachary Ezra Rawlins steps inside the Queen of the Bees and descends farther into the depths.

  Eleanor does not know what to do with the baby.

  The baby cries and eats and cries some more and sometimes sleeps. The order or duration of these activities has no logical progression.

  She expected the Keeper to be more helpful but he is not. He does not like the baby. He refers to it as the child and not by name, though Eleanor herself is at fault for that because she has not yet given the baby a name.

  (Eleanor used to be the child herself. She does not know when that stopped or what she is now if she is something else.)

  The baby does not require a name. There are no other babies to confuse it with. It is the only one. It is special. Unique. It is the baby. Sometimes the child, but it is very much a baby.

  Before the baby was born Eleanor read all the books she could find about babies but books did not prepare her for the actual baby. Books do not scream and wail and fuss and stare.

  She asks the Keeper questions but he does not answer them. He keeps the door to his office closed. She asks the painter and the poets and they help for hours at a time, the painter more than the poets, allowing her to slip into too-short dreamless sleeps but eventually it is always her and it, alone together.

  She writes notes to the Kitchen.

  She is not certain the Kitchen will reply. She sometimes wrote it tiny notes when she was younger, it would not always respond. If she wrote Hello, it would write Hello in return and it would answer questions, but once Eleanor asked who it was down there cooking and preparing and fixing things but that note went unanswered.

  She sends her first baby-related inquiry with trepidation, relieved when the light turns on.

  The Kitchen provides excellent responses to her questions. Detailed lists of things to try. Politely worded encouragements and suggestions.

  The Kitchen sends up bottles of warm milk for the baby and cupcakes for Eleanor.

  The Kitchen suggests she read to the baby and Eleanor feels stupid for not trying that before. She misses Sweet Sorrows and regrets giving it away. She feels sorry for pulling pages out, all the bits she didn’t like when she first read it. She wonders if she would like those parts better now if she could read them again but they are lost, folded into stars and thrown in dark corners like her old nightmares. She tries to remember why it was she did not like them. There was the part about the stag in the snow that made her heart hurt, and the bit about the rising sea and someone lost an eye but she does not recall who. She thinks now it is silly to be upset by the fates of characters who do not exist to the point of ripping out pages and hiding them away but it made sense to her at the time. This place made more sense when she was a rabbit, sneaking through the darkness like she owned it, like the world was hers. She can’t remember when that changed.

  Perhaps she herself is a page that was torn from a story and folded into a star and thrown in the shadows to be forgotten.

  Perhaps she should not steal books from hidden archives only to rip out their pages and then give them away, but it is too late to change any of that now and a beloved book is still beloved even if it was stolen to begin with and imperfect and then lost.

  Eleanor remembers most of Sweet Sorrows well enough to repeat parts of it to the baby, the stories about the pirate, the dollhouse, the bit about the girl who fell through a door that seems so familiar she sometimes thinks she lived it, though she read it so many times it almost feels as though she did.

  The Kitchen sends a stuffed rabbit with soft brown fur and floppy ears.

  The baby likes the bunny more than it likes most things.

 
Between the bunny and the reading Eleanor manages to find some calm, even if it is often temporary.

  She misses Simon. She is done crying, though she spent plenty of nights and days sobbing once she had been convinced there was no getting back into the room and that even if she did she would never see Simon again.

  She knows she will never see him again because the Keeper told her as much. She will never see him again because he never saw her again. The Keeper knows because he was there. Has always been here. He mumbled something about time and waved her away.

  Eleanor thinks the Keeper understands the past better than he understands the future.

  She never felt she belonged here and now she feels it doubly so.

  She looks for Simon in the baby’s face but finds only hints of him. The baby has her dark hair though it is pale when not screaming. She wanted so badly for the baby to have Simon’s blondish hair but none of the books suggest that a baby’s hair color changes from black to something else after a certain time. Eye color might, but right now they stay squeezed shut so much Eleanor isn’t certain what color they are.

  She should give it a name.

  It feels like too much responsibility, to give someone else a name.

  “What should I name it?” she writes to the Kitchen.

  When the light comes on and Eleanor opens the door there is not a tray or a card but a scrap of paper that looks as though it was torn from a book with a single word written on it.

  Mirabel

  Vermont, two weeks ago

  The bar is dimly lit with vintage bulbs that cast a candle-like glow over its glassware and its occupants. Additional light filters in from the windows despite the late hour, the streetlamps illuminating the snow to day-like brightness.

  A man whose name is not Dorian sits alone at a table in a corner, his back to the wall. The wall sports a pair of deer antlers, a taxidermied pheasant, and a portrait of a young man hung as a traitor in a war no one living now remembers. The still-living man in front of the painting faces out toward the rest of the bar in a way that suggests he is watching the entire space and not one other table in particular.

  One person in particular.

  The drink he is nursing was suggested by the waitress when he requested something scotch-forward and he forgets its clever name but there is maple involved.

  He has an open book but he is not reading (he has already read it). It merely allows him to keep his gaze focused in the direction of a table of three across the way, the view only partially obscured by the occasional patron lingering near the bar, which is topped by a massive piece of marble that looks as though it was rescued from a much older building.

  Two young women (one he has seen already, in the morning in the snow) and a marginally older man. He had questioned the nature of the relationship earlier but the more he follows and the more he watches, the more he sees and the more he wants to know.

  The two women are the couple, if he is reading body language and eye contact correctly. He catches a hand placed on a thigh that confirms his suspicions and he is pleased with himself despite the fact that he has done this before, many times, in many bars, and he is long past the point of being proud of a well-developed skill. He is good at this. Has always been good at this, reading people like books from across dimly lit rooms.

  The women he can read. The one with the very short hair talks quickly, emphasizes her points with her hands, looks around at the rest of the bar frequently. The other woman is more subdued, comfortable and relaxed, she’s slipped her feet from her boots under the table and Dorian is momentarily envious. She’s at home in this space, with these people, though she listens in a particularly attentive way. She knows the other two but not as well as she would like to.

  Then there’s the man.

  He’s facing almost away, the light catching his profile when he lifts his cocktail glass, his expression lost entirely when he turns, a shadow of snow-damp curls.

  Dorian had expected a boy. A student. A handful of collegiate clichés. This is a man. A young man, but a man. An intriguing man. A man who studies video games of all things.

  Looking at him now Dorian can’t see it. He cannot read the handful of facts on the man in front of him. He had thought social anxiety and hermit earlier but that’s not what he’s looking at. The shyness is a minor discomfort that vanished halfway through the first round of drinks. He listens more than he talks but when he does talk there is nothing awkward about his manner. He occasionally pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and appears to be drinking a sidecar though he must have asked for it to be served without a sugared rim.

  A man he can’t read. It is as vexing as having a book he cannot touch. An all too familiar frustration.

  “How’s the book?”

  Dorian looks up to find the waitress at his shoulder, refilling his water. She probably swooped by to check the level of his drink: half full or half empty, depending on optimism. He glances at the book in his hands. The Secret History. He has quietly longed for relationships with the type of intensity of those within its pages, regardless of the bacchanalian murderousness, but never found it and has now reached an age where he expects he never will. He has read the book seven times already but he does not tell the waitress that.

  “It’s very good,” he says.

  “I started that bird one but I couldn’t get into it.”

  “This one’s better,” Dorian assures her, coolly enough to shut down the flirtation. Some but not all of the warmth fades from her smile.

  “Good to know,” she says. “Let me know if I can get you anything.”

  Dorian nods and returns his attention to just above the top of his book. He thinks the group he is looking at does not have the same level of camaraderie as the characters in his hand but there’s something there. Like each of them individually is capable of the intensity if not the murder but this is not the right grouping. Not quite. He watches their table, watches the hand gestures and the arriving food, and watches something make all three of them laugh and he smiles despite himself and then hides his smile in his drink.

  Every few minutes he performs a cursory perusal of the room. Pretty good crowd, probably because there are only a handful of bars in this town. He glances at the Tenniel illustration of a gryphon over the bar and wonders if anyone ever names bars after the Mock Turtle.

  Below the sign, amongst a knot of other patrons, a girl who looks a touch familiar lifts her arm in a gesture meant to attract the bartender’s attention but as her arm moves over a tray of glasses waiting to be delivered to a table Dorian sees the purpose of the motion. The almost invisible trail of powder that settles into the sidecar with no sugar below and dissolves into the liquid.

  The girl leaves without getting the bartender’s attention at all, slipping first into an anonymous cluster of drinkers and then out the door. Don’t stay to watch. He knows that one. He used to break that particular rule occasionally, to be certain. These newer recruits don’t take the time to see the nuances around the guidelines. Certainty is worth bending rules for.

  He could let it go.

  He has performed similar actions himself, many times. And worse. He thinks of the last time—the last time—and his hands start to shake. For a moment he is in a different city in a dark hotel room and everything he thought he knew is wrong and his world tilts and then he collects himself again. He puts down his book.

  He wonders if the powder in this particular glass is the low-grade amnesia version or the serious stuff. Either would be undetectable, leave its recipient woozy in an hour or two, followed by passing out and waking up terribly hungover or not waking up at all.

  Dorian rises from his chair as a waitress picks up the tray and by the time he reaches it he has decided both that it probably is the serious stuff and that it doesn’t matter.r />
  It is simple to knock into the waitress, to send the tray and its contents crashing to the floor, simple to apologize for fabricated clumsiness, to offer to assist and be waved away, to return to his table as though that was always his destination and not his point of origin.

  How did everything lead to this? One book, one man. Years of mystery and tedium and now things insist on happening all at once.

  He’s too interested already. He knows that.

  Why did he have to be interesting?

  The unexpectedly interesting young man gets up from his table, leaving the two women chatting. He turns and walks to the back of the bar, something in his face changes as soon as he’s out of sight of the table. Not a drunkenness but a dreaminess, a not quite there, lost in thought fog, maybe with a bit of worry thrown in. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Dorian glances back at the table and one of the women is looking right at him. She breaks eye contact immediately and continues talking, writing something down on a cocktail napkin. But she saw him. Watched him watching.

  Time to go.

  He puts his book away and slides more than enough cash for his single cocktail and a good tip under his empty glass. He’s outside in the snow avoiding the puddles of light from the streetlamps by the time Zachary Ezra Rawlins returns to his table.

  Dorian can see the table from here, a hazy shadow through a frosted pane of glass but distinct from the other shadows moving through the space.

  He knows better than this. He shouldn’t be here. He should have walked away a year ago, after a different night in a different city when nothing went according to plan.

  How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment?

  Again his hands start to shake and he shoves them in the pockets of his coat.

  Something broke then but he’s here now. He doesn’t know where else to go. What else to do.

  He could leave. He could run. Keep running. Continue hiding. He could forget all this. This book, his book, the Starless Sea, all of it.