The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  The painter makes her decision without telling anyone. Only her single student notices her absence but thinks little of it having learned long ago that sometimes people disappear like rabbits into hats and sometimes they return and other times they do not.

  The acolytes allow for this rare concession, as their numbers are dwindling.

  The painter spends her time in solitude and contemplation categorizing losses and regrets trying to determine if there was ever anything she could have done to prevent any of them or if they simply passed through her life and out again like waves upon a shore.

  She thinks if she has an idea for a new painting at any point during her time locked away she will refuse this path and return to her paints and let the bees find someone else to serve them.

  But there are no new ideas. Only old ones, turned over and over again in her mind. Only the safe and the familiar, things she has captured and recaptured in brushstrokes so many times that she finds nothing but emptiness within them.

  She considers trying to write but has always felt more comfortable with images than with words.

  When the door opens long before the painter expects it to she accepts her bee without hesitation.

  The acolyte and the painter walk down empty halls toward an unmarked door. Only a single cat notices them in this moment and though the cat recognizes this mistake for what it is he does not interfere. It is not the way of cats to interfere with fate.

  The painter expects to sacrifice both eyes but only one is taken.

  One will be more than enough.

  As the images flood the painter’s sight, as she is bombarded by so many pictures unfolding in such detail that she cannot separate one from the other, cannot dream of capturing even fractions of them in oils on canvas even as her fingers itch for her brushes, she realizes this path was not meant for her.

  But it is too late now to choose another.

  ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS walks the halls of the Harbor, realizing that he doesn’t actually know where Mirabel’s room is, he had not thought to ask. He loops down through the cavernous ballroom to where he last saw her but the wine cellar is unoccupied. The painting of the lady with her bee-covered face looms over the racks of wine and before Zachary leaves again he picks an interesting-looking bottle to put in his bag, an unnamed red marked with a lantern and crossed keys.

  Zachary takes a different flight of stairs up from the ballroom and doesn’t know where he is. He has wandered from familiar to un- again.

  He pauses, trying to get his bearings, by a reading nook lined with books with a single armchair and a small table formed from a broken column. There’s a teacup on it, with a lit candle burning where the tea should be.

  Between the bookshelves is a small brass plate with a button, like an old-fashioned light switch. Zachary presses it.

  The bookshelf slides back, opening into a hidden room.

  It would take an eternity to find all the secrets here, the voice in his head observes. To solve a fraction of the mysteries. Zachary doesn’t argue with it.

  The room beyond looks like something from an old manor house, or a period-piece murder mystery. Dark wood panels and green glass lamps. Leather sofas and overlapping Oriental rugs and walls covered in bookshelves, one of which has opened to allow Zachary inside. In between the shelves there are framed paintings lit with gallery lights and a proper door, open and leading out to a hall.

  An enormous painting is displayed on the wall opposite. A nighttime forest scene, a crescent moon visible between the branches, but within the forest there is an immense birdcage, so large that on the perch inside where a bird might be there is a man, turned away from the viewer, sitting forlornly in his prison.

  The trees surrounding the cage are covered with keys and stars, hanging by ribbons from branches and tucked into nests and fallen onto the ground below. It makes Zachary think of his bunny pirates. It might have been painted by the same artist. The wine-cellar bee lady might have been, too, for that matter.

  Dorian stands in front of the painting, staring at it. He wears a long felted wool coat, midnight blue and collarless and perfectly tailored to fit him with polished buttons that might be wood or bone shaped like stars so he matches the painting. The coat has coordinating trousers but he’s barefoot.

  He turns as the bookshelf closes behind Zachary.

  “You’re here,” Dorian says, and it sounds more like an observation about the place in general than Zachary appearing out of a bookshelf in particular.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I thought I’d dreamed you.”

  Zachary has no idea how to respond to that comment and is relieved when Dorian turns his attention back to the painting. He probably thinks that drunken story time was also a dream and maybe that’s for the best. Zachary walks over and stands next to Dorian and side by side they observe the man in his cage.

  “I feel like I’ve seen this before,” Dorian remarks.

  “It reminds me of the key collector’s garden, from your book,” Zachary says and Dorian turns to him, surprised. “I read it. I’m sorry.” The apology is automatic though he’s not actually sorry.

  “Don’t be,” Dorian says. He turns back to the painting.

  “How are you feeling?” Zachary asks.

  “Like I’m losing my mind, but in a slow, achingly beautiful sort of way.”

  “Yeah, I get that. So better, then.”

  Dorian smiles and Zachary wonders how you can miss someone’s smile when you’ve only seen it once before.

  “Yes, better. Thank you.”

  “You’re not wearing shoes.”

  “I hate shoes.”

  “Hate is a strong emotion for footwear,” Zachary observes.

  “Most of my emotions are strong,” Dorian responds and again Zachary doesn’t know how to reply and Dorian saves him from having to.

  Dorian takes a step toward Zachary, suddenly and unexpectedly close, and reaches out his hand, placing it on Zachary’s chest above his heart. It takes Zachary a moment to realize what he’s doing: confirming his solidity. He wonders how easy it is to feel a heartbeat through a sweater.

  “You’re really here,” Dorian says quietly. “We’re both really here.”

  Zachary doesn’t know what to say so he just nods as they stare at each other. There is a warmness to the brown of Dorian’s eyes that he had not been able to see before. There is a scar above his left eyebrow. There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. I would like to look at you seems like such an awkward request.

  Zachary watches Dorian’s eyes move across his skin in a similar fashion, wondering how many of their thoughts are shared ones.

  Dorian looks down at his hand and sighs.

  “Are you wearing pajamas?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Zachary says, realizing that he is indeed still wearing his blue-striped pajamas and then he starts to laugh at the absurdity of it all and after a brief hesitation Dorian joins him.

  Something changes in the laughter, something is lost and something else is found and though Zachary does not have words for what has happened, there is an ease between them that wasn’t there before.

  “What were you doing in the bookshelf?” Dorian asks.

  “I was trying to figure out what to do next,” Zachary says. “I was looking for Mirabel but I couldn’t find her and then I got lost so I started looking for something familiar and I found you.”

  “Am I familiar?” Dorian says and Zachary wants to say Yes, yes you are the most familiar and I don’t understand how but that is too much truth right now so instead he says, “If you were a man lost in time where would you be?”

  “Don’t you mean when would I be?”

  “That, too,” Zachary says, smiling despite the realization that the whole locating-a-man-lost-i
n-time quest might be far more difficult than he’d thought. He looks back at the painting.

  “How are you feeling?” Dorian asks him in response to whatever grumpy frustration his face is betraying.

  “Like I’ve lost my mind already and post-mind life is one puzzle after another.” Zachary looks at the man in the cage. The cage looks real, the lock heavy and looped through the bars on a chain. It looks real enough to touch. To fool the eye.

  For a moment he feels like that boy he was again, standing in front of a painted door he won’t dare to open. What’s the difference between a door and a cage? Between not yet and too late?

  “What kind of puzzles?” Dorian asks.

  “Ever since I got here it’s been all notes and clues and mysteries. First there was the Queen of the Bees but she just led me to a hidden crypt filled with memory-wrapped dead people where my cat abandoned me and a book told me there were three things lost in time. Please don’t look at me like that.”

  “A book told you?”

  “It fell apart in little instructional pieces but I don’t know what it means and I was surrounded by corpses so I didn’t particularly want to stick around to figure it out and the book was gone anyway. Also there was a ghost in the hall after that. I think. Maybe.”

  “Are you certain you didn’t imag—”

  Zachary cuts him off before he can say the word.

  “You think I’m making it up?” Zachary asks. “We’re in an underground library, you’ve seen painted doors open on solid walls, and you think I’m imagining bibliomancy and maybe-ghosts?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorian says. “I don’t know what to believe right now.”

  The two of them stare at each other in a silence laced with multiple types of tension until Zachary can’t take it any longer.

  “Sit,” he says, pointing at one of the leather sofas. There is a reading lamp with a green glass shade poised over it. He expects Dorian to argue but he doesn’t, he sits as directed and says nothing, compliant, though his expression betrays his annoyance. “Finish reading this,” Zachary says, taking Sweet Sorrows from his bag and handing it to Dorian. “When you’re done, read this one.” He puts The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor on a table nearby. “Do you have your book with you?”

  Dorian takes Fortunes and Fables from the pocket of his coat. “You won’t be able to read…” He pauses as Zachary takes the book from him. “You said you already read it.”

  “I did,” Zachary says. “I thought rereading might be helpful. What is it?” he asks, watching the question forming on Dorian’s face.

  “To the best of my knowledge you only speak English and French.”

  “I wouldn’t call what I can do in French speaking,” Zachary clarifies, trying to gauge how mad he is and finding the anger has dissipated. He sits on the other sofa and carefully opens Fortunes and Fables. “The books translate themselves down here. I think speech does, too, but I’ve only been speaking to people in English or hand gestures. Come to think of it the Keeper probably doesn’t speak to me in English, that was presumptuous.”

  “How is that possible?” Dorian asks.

  “How is any of this possible? I don’t even understand the physics of the bookshelves.”

  “I asked you that in Mandarin.”

  “You speak Mandarin?”

  “I speak a lot of languages,” Dorian says and Zachary pays close attention to his lips. They don’t quite match the words that reach his ears, like when the book translations blur before they settle again. Zachary wonders if he even would have noticed the difference if he wasn’t looking for it.

  “Did you say that in Mandarin, too?” he asks.

  “I said that in Urdu.”

  “You do speak a lot of languages.”

  Dorian sighs and looks down at the book in his hands and then at the man in the cage on the wall and then back at Zachary.

  “You look like you want to leave,” Zachary says and Dorian’s expression immediately shifts to one of surprise.

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” he says, and he holds Zachary’s gaze for a moment before turning his attention to Sweet Sorrows.

  Zachary is midway through Fortunes and Fables wondering if there is more than one Owl King when Dorian suddenly looks up at him.

  “This…this boy in the library, with the woman in the green scarf. This is me,” he says.

  “You are having a much calmer reaction to being in the book than I did.”

  “How…” Dorian starts and trails off, still reading. A minute later he adds, “It’s only that part at the beginning, I never did any of these other tests.”

  “But you were a guardian.”

  “No, I was a member in high standing of the Collector’s Club,” Dorian corrects without looking up from the page. “Though I would gather that the club is an evolution of this. There are…similarities.” Dorian looks up from the book and around the room, at the bookshelves and the painting and the door out to the hall. A cat passes by without so much as glancing inside. “Allegra always said we had to wait until it was safe and secured. She told me that for years and I believed her. ‘Safe and secured’ was a constantly moving goal. Always more doors to close and more problematic individuals to eliminate. Always soon and never now.”

  “Is that what the whole Collector’s Club believes?”

  “That if they do what Allegra tells them for long enough they will earn their place in paradise which is—as Borges supposed—a kind of library? Yes, they do believe that.”

  “That sounds like a cult,” Zachary observes.

  To his surprise Dorian laughs.

  “It does indeed,” he admits.

  “Did you believe all that?” Zachary asks.

  Dorian considers the question before he responds.

  “Yes I did. I believed. Steadfastly. I accepted a lot of things on faith and there came a night that made me question everything and I ran away. I disappeared. That did not go over well. They froze my cards under all my aliases, made some versions of me no longer exist and put others on watch lists and no-fly lists and all sorts of lists. But I had a great deal of cash and I was in Manhattan. It’s easy to stay lost in Manhattan. I could walk around midtown in a suit with a briefcase and I’d vanish into the crowd though I was usually going to the library.”

  “What changed your mind?” Zachary asks.

  “Not what. Who. Mirabel changed my mind,” Dorian says and before Zachary can inquire further Dorian returns his attention back to the book, the conversation pointedly and clearly halted.

  They read in silence for some time. Zachary sneaks occasional glances at Dorian, trying to guess where he is in the book based on eyebrow reaction.

  Eventually Dorian closes Sweet Sorrows and puts it down on the table. He frowns and holds out a hand and Zachary gives him The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor without a word and they return to reading.

  Zachary is lost in a fairy tale (wondering what kind of box the story sculptor hid what he’s guessing was Fate’s heart inside) when Dorian closes the book.

  Slowly they attempt to sort through a thousand questions. For every connection they make between one book and another there are more that don’t fit. Some stories seem completely separate and distant and others feel explicitly connected to the story they have found themselves in together now.

  “There was…” Dorian starts but then pauses and when he continues he addresses the man on the wall instead of the man sitting across from him. “There was an organization that was referred to as the Keating Foundation. Never publicly, it was an in-house term. I never knew its origin, no one was ever named Keating but it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “The library had this marked as a gift from the Keating Foundation,” Zachary says, holding up Sweet Sorrows. “How were they related to the Collector’s Club?”

  “They
worked in opposition. They were…targets to be eliminated.” Dorian pauses. He stands and paces the room and Zachary has a sudden sense of the cage in the painting not being restricted to the wall.

  “What did your crypt book tell you again?” Dorian asks, pausing to pick up The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor and flipping through it while he paces.

  “There are three things lost in time. A book, a sword, and a man. Sweet Sorrows must be the book, since Eleanor gave it to Simon and then it spent, what, a hundred years on the surface? The instructions said ‘find man’ and not ‘find man and sword’ so maybe the sword has already been returned, too. There’s a sword in the Keeper’s office, hanging all conspicuous in plain sight.”

  “Simon’s the man lost in time,” Dorian says.

  “He must be. The man lost in time from Sweet Sorrows even has the coat with the buttons.”

  Dorian picks up Sweet Sorrows, flipping back and forth between both books.

  “Who do you think is the pirate?” he asks.

  “I think the pirate is a metaphor.”

  “A metaphor for what?”

  “I don’t know,” Zachary says. He sighs and looks back at the man in his painted cage surrounded by so many keys.

  “Who is the painter?” Dorian asks at the same time that the voice in Zachary’s head poses the same question.

  “I don’t know,” Zachary says. “I’ve seen a bunch that are probably by the same artist. There’s one with bunny pirates in my room.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Sure.”

  Zachary puts Sweet Sorrows and The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor in his bag and Dorian replaces Fortunes and Fables in his pocket and they set off down the hall, one that Zachary sort of recognizes, a tunnel-shaped one where the bookshelves curve with each turn.

  “How much have you seen?” Zachary asks as they walk, watching Dorian slow and stare at their surroundings.

  “Just a few rooms,” he responds, looking down past his bare feet. The floor in this hall is glass, revealing a room below filled with movable panel screens with stories printed on them, though from this perspective it is a story about a cat in a maze. “The only people I’ve seen are you and that fluffy-haired angel girl in the white robes who doesn’t speak.”