The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  “That’s Rhyme,” Zachary says. “She’s an acolyte.”

  “Does she have a tongue?”

  “I didn’t ask, I figured it would be rude.”

  Dorian pauses at an ornate telescope resting next to an armchair. It is aimed at a window set into the stone wall next to it. He undoes the latch and opens the window. The view beyond it is mostly darkness with a soft light in the distance.

  Dorian returns to the telescope and looks out the window through it. Zachary watches as a smile tugs at the corner of his lips. After a moment he steps aside and gestures for Zachary to look.

  Once Zachary’s eyes have adjusted to eyeglasses-plus-telescope-lenses he can see into the distance, through a cavernous space. There are windows into other rooms, in some other part of the Harbor, carved into a wall of jagged rock that descends into the shadows, but on the expanse of illuminated stone there rests the remains of a large ship. Its hull is cracked in two, its sea stolen from beneath it. A tattered flag hangs limply from its mast. Piles of books are stacked on the sloping deck.

  “Were there sirens here, do you think?” Dorian asks, his voice very close to Zachary’s ear. “Singing sailors to shipwreck?”

  Zachary closes his eyes, trying to imagine this ship on a sea.

  He turns from the telescope, expecting Dorian to be next to him but Dorian has already moved farther down the hall.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Zachary says when he catches up with him.

  “Of course.”

  “Why did you help me, back in New York?” It is something Zachary has not been able to figure out, thinking that there must be more to it than simply getting his own book back.

  “Because I wanted to,” Dorian says. “I’ve spent a great deal of my life doing what other people wanted for me and not what I wanted myself and I’m trying to change. Impulse decisions. No shoes. It’s refreshing in a terrifying sort of way.”

  A few turns and a hall filled with stained-glass stories later they reach Zachary’s door. Zachary goes to open it but it is locked. He had forgotten that he locked it and retrieves his keys from beneath his sweater.

  “You’re still wearing it,” Dorian remarks, looking at the silver sword and Zachary doesn’t know how to respond to that beyond the terribly obvious affirmation that yes he is still wearing it and rarely takes it off but as he opens the door he is immediately distracted by the indignant howling of the Persian cat that he has accidentally locked inside.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Zachary says to the cat. The cat says nothing, only weaves its way through his legs before heading off down the hallway.

  “How long was he in here?” Dorian asks.

  “A couple of hours?” Zachary guesses.

  “Well at least he was comfortable,” Dorian says, looking around the room. He turns his attention to the painting over the mantel. It looks like a classic tall-ship seascape, with ominous clouds and choppy waves, completely realistic save for the leporine pirates. “Do you think it’s a coincidence?” he asks. “A girl who pretends to be a rabbit who knows a painter, and then the paintings with the rabbits?”

  “You think the painter painted them for Eleanor.”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” Dorian says. “I think there is a story here.”

  “I think there are a lot of stories here,” Zachary says. He puts his bag down and the bottle of wine clanks against the stone. Zachary takes it out and brushes dust from the lantern and the keys on it, wondering who bottled it and how long it had been in the cellar, waiting for someone to open it. Why not now?

  Zachary looks at the corked bottle and frowns.

  “Don’t judge me,” he says to Dorian as he picks up a pen from the desk and uses it to push the cork all the way into the bottle, a trick he used many, many times as an undergraduate lacking proper bar tools.

  “We could have found a corkscrew somewhere,” Dorian remarks as he observes the inelegant process.

  “You used to be mildly impressed by my improvisational skills,” Zachary responds, holding up the successfully opened bottle.

  Dorian laughs as Zachary takes a swig of the wine. It probably would benefit from decanting and maybe glasses but it is rich and lush and bright. Luminous, somehow, like the lantern on it. It doesn’t whisper verses or stories around his tongue and into his head, thankfully, but it tastes older than stories. It tastes like myth.

  Zachary offers the bottle up to Dorian and he takes it, letting his fingers rest over Zachary’s as he does so.

  “You went back for me, didn’t you?” Dorian asks suddenly. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, everything’s still cloudy.”

  “It was mostly Mirabel,” Zachary says. “I sidekicked and then I got tied to a chair and poisoned.” It all feels distant now, even though it was so recent. “I got better,” he adds.

  “Thank you,” Dorian says. “You didn’t have to do that. You owed me nothing and I…thank you. I thought I might not wake up at all and instead I woke up here.”

  “You’re welcome,” Zachary says, though he feels he should say more.

  “How long ago was that?” Dorian asks. “Four days? Five? A week? It feels longer.”

  Zachary looks at him wordlessly, without a proper answer. He thinks it might be a week, or a lifetime, or a moment. He thinks I feel like I have known you forever but he doesn’t say it and so they only hold each other’s gaze, not needing to say anything.

  “Where did you get this?” Dorian asks after he takes a sip from the bottle.

  “In the wine cellar. It’s at the far end of the ballroom, past where the Starless Sea used to be.”

  Dorian looks at him with that thousand-questions expression in his eyes but instead of asking any of them he takes another swig of wine and hands the bottle back to Zachary.

  “It must have been something extraordinary, back in its time,” he says.

  “Why do you think people came here?” Zachary says, taking another myth-tinged sip before handing the bottle to Dorian, unable to tell if the rush in his head and his pulse is from the wine or the way Dorian’s fingers move over his.

  “I think people came here for the same reason we came here,” Dorian says. “In search of something. Even if we didn’t know what it was. Something more. Something to wonder at. Someplace to belong. We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own. To Seeking,” Dorian says, tilting the bottle toward Zachary.

  “To Finding,” Zachary responds, repeating the gesture once Dorian hands him the bottle.

  “I do like that you’ve read my book,” Dorian says. “Thank you again for helping me get it back.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately. Which was your favorite?”

  Zachary considers the question while also considering the particular use of the word intimately. He thinks over the stories, snippets of images coming back to him as he lets himself consider them simply as stories instead of trying to break them apart searching for their secrets. He looks at the bottle in his hands, the keys and the lantern, thinking of seers in taverns and shared bottles in snow-covered inns.

  “I don’t know. I liked the one with the swords. So many of them were kind of sad. I think the innkeeper and the moon were my favorite, but I wanted…” Zachary stops, not certain what he wanted from it. More, maybe. He hands the bottle back to Dorian.

  “You wanted a happier ending?”

  “No…not necessarily happier. I wanted more story. I wanted to know what happened afterward, I wanted the moon to figure out a way to come back even if she couldn’t stay. All those stories are like that, they feel like pieces of bigger stories. Like there’s mo
re that happens beyond the pages.”

  Dorian nods, thoughtfully. “Is that a wardrobe?” he asks, gesturing at the piece of furniture on the other side of the room.

  “Yes,” Zachary says, distracted into stating the obvious.

  “Have you checked it?”

  “For what?” Zachary asks but realizes as Dorian’s disbelieving eyebrow rises. “Oh. Oh, no, I haven’t.”

  It is, he thinks, the only proper wardrobe he has ever had and after the considerable amount of time he has spent sitting in closets literally and figuratively he cannot believe he has not yet checked this one for a door to Narnia.

  Dorian hands the bottle of wine to Zachary and walks over to the wardrobe.

  “I have never been particularly fond of Narnia myself,” Dorian says as he runs his fingers over the carved wooden doors. “Too much direct allegory for my tastes. Though it does have a certain romance to it. The snow. The gentlemanly satyr.”

  He opens the doors and smiles, though Zachary cannot tell what it is he’s smiling at.

  He reaches out an arm and parts the hanging rows of linen and cashmere, slowly, carefully. Drawing the motion out rather than reaching immediately to touch the back of the wardrobe. Taking his time.

  He doesn’t even need words to tell a story, a voice somewhere in Zachary’s head observes and he suddenly desperately wishes that he was currently occupying the sweater that Dorian has his hand on and he is so distracted by this thought that it takes him a moment to realize that Dorian has stepped into the wardrobe and vanished.

  A man momentarily found in time storms down a hall, finding his way out of time again.

  A fallen candelabra is not an unusual thing. The acolytes anticipate them, they have a way of knowing when a flame might tumble. There are methods for avoiding accidents.

  Acolytes cannot predict the actions of a man who has been lost in time. They cannot know where or when he will appear. They are not there when and where he does.

  There are not as many acolytes as there once were and they are all, at this moment, tending to other matters.

  The fire creeps at first and then catches, pulling books from their shelves in curling paper and reducing candles to pools of molten wax.

  It tears through the halls, moving like the sea over everything in its path.

  It finds the room with the dollhouse and it claims it for its own, an entire universe lost in flame.

  The dolls see only brightness and then nothing.

  ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS stares into a wardrobe that contains only a great deal of sweaters and linen shirts and trousers and questions his sanity again.

  “Dorian?” he says. He must be hiding in the shadows, curled up beneath hanging garments the way Zachary has sat so many times himself, in a world alone, compact and forgotten.

  Zachary reaches a hand through sweaters and shirts, wondering why he would accept shadows as shadows in a place where so much is more than what it seems and where his fingers should touch solid wood they touch nothing instead.

  He laughs but it catches in his throat. He steps into the wardrobe, reaching farther and there is emptiness where the back should be, beyond where the wall would have met his fingers.

  He takes one step and then another, cashmere brushing against his back. The light from his room fades quickly. He puts a hand out to his side and hits slightly curving solid stone. A tunnel, maybe.

  Zachary walks forward. He reaches into the darkness in front of him and a hand grabs his.

  “Let’s see where this goes, shall we?” Dorian whispers in his ear.

  Zachary grasps Dorian’s hand and thus entwined they proceed through the tunnel as it turns, leading them into another room.

  This room is lit by a single candle, placed in front of a mirror so its flame is doubled.

  “I don’t think this is Narnia,” Dorian says.

  Zachary lets his eyes adjust to the light. Dorian is correct, it is not Narnia. It is a room filled with doors.

  Each door is carved with images. Zachary walks toward the closest one, losing his grip on Dorian’s hand in the process and regretting it but too curious.

  On the door there is a girl holding a lantern aloft against a dark sky teeming with winged creatures, screaming and clawing and hissing at her.

  “Let’s not open that one,” Zachary says.

  “Agreed,” Dorian says, looking over his shoulder.

  They move from door to door. Here is a carved city spiked with curving towers. There an island under a moonlit sky.

  One door depicts a figure behind bars reaching out to another in a separate cage and it reminds Zachary of the pirate in the basement. He goes to open it but Dorian pulls his attention to another.

  This door holds a carved celebration. Dozens of faceless figures dancing under banners and lanterns. One banner has a string of moons engraved upon it, a full moon surrounded by waxing and waning crescents.

  Dorian opens the door. The space beyond is dark. He steps inside.

  Zachary follows but as soon as he enters Dorian is gone.

  “Dorian?” Zachary says, turning back to the room with its multitude of doors but that too has vanished.

  He turns again and he is standing in a well-lit hallway lined with books.

  A pair of women in long gowns brush by, clearly more interested in each other than him, laughing as they pass.

  “Hello?” Zachary calls after them but they do not turn.

  He looks behind him. There is no door, only books. Tall shelves messily stacked and piled, a well-used collection, some sitting open. A few shelves down there is a handsome young man with ginger hair so bright it borders on a proper red browsing through one of the volumes.

  “Excuse me,” Zachary says but the man does not look up from his book. Zachary puts a hand out to touch him on the shoulder and the fabric feels strange beneath his fingers, there but not there. The idea of touching a man’s shoulder in a suit jacket and not the actual feeling. The touch version of a movie that has not been dubbed properly. Zachary pulls his hand back in surprise.

  The ginger-haired man looks up, not quite at him.

  “Are you here for the party?” he asks.

  “What party?” Zachary responds but before the man can answer they are interrupted.

  “Winston!” a male voice calls from around the next bend in the hallway, in the direction that the girls in gowns had been heading. The ginger-haired man puts down his book and gives Zachary a little bow before going to follow the voice.

  “I think I saw a ghost,” Zachary hears him remark casually to his companion before they disappear down the hall.

  Zachary looks at his hands. They look the same as usual. He picks up the book the man had replaced on the shelf and it feels solid but not quite solid in his hands, like his brain is telling him he’s holding a book without there actually being a book there.

  But there is a book there. He opens it and to his surprise he recognizes the fragments of poetry on the page. Sappho.

  someone will remember us

  I say

  even in another time

  Zachary closes the book and puts it back on the shelf, the weight of it not quite transferring at the same time as the action but he finds himself anticipating the tactile discrepancies already.

  Laughter bubbles from another hall. Music plays in the distance. Zachary is undoubtedly within his familiar Harbor on the Starless Sea but everything is vibrant and alive. There are so many people.

  He walks by something he thinks is a golden statue of a naked woman until she moves and he realizes the gold is meticulously painted onto an actual naked woman. She reaches out and touches his arm as he passes, leaving streaks of golden powder on his sleeve.

  As he continues few others acknowledge him but people seem to know he is there. They move out of the
way as he passes. The frequency of people increases as he walks and then he realizes where they are going.

  Another turn brings him to the wide stair that leads down to the ballroom. The stairs are festooned with lanterns and garlands of paper dipped in gold. Confetti cascades in gilded waves over the stone steps. It clings to the hems of gowns and cuffs of trousers, drifting and swirling as the crowd descends.

  Zachary follows, swept up in the tide of partygoers. The ballroom they enter is both familiar and completely unexpected.

  The space he knows as hollow and empty is teeming with people. All of the chandeliers are lit, casting dancing light over the hall. The ceiling is littered with metallic balloons. Long glimmering ribbons hang from them and as Zachary gets closer he sees they are weighted with pearls. Everything is undulating, shimmering, and golden. It smells like honey and incense, musk and sweat and wine.

  Virtual reality isn’t all that real if it doesn’t smell like anything, a voice remarks in his head.

  The curtains of balloons are mazelike, the enormous space divided and fragmented by almost transparent walls. One space becomes many: improvised rooms, alcoves, small vignettes of chairs, carpets in rich jewel tones covering the stone floor, and tables draped in silks of darkest night-sky blue dotted with stars, covered in brass bowls and vases, piled with wine and fruit and cheese.

  Beside him is a woman with her hair tied up in a scarf wearing acolyte robes holding a large bowl filled with golden liquid. As he watches, guests dip their hands into the bowl, removing them again covered in shimmering gold. It drips down arms and on sleeves and Zachary spies golden fingerprints behind ears and down the backs of necks, suggestive traces over necklines and below waists.

  Closer to the center of the ballroom the ribbon curtains open, allowing the room to expand into its full scope. A dance floor occupies most of the space, stretching out to the archways on the far side.