The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  Zachary stares into the darkness after the giant white rabbit.

  Did this all begin with a book?

  Or is it older than that? Is everything that brought him here now much, much older?

  He tries to pinpoint the moments, tries to sort out their meanings.

  There are no meanings. Not anymore.

  The voice is like a whisper made of wind.

  “What?” Zachary asks aloud.

  “What?” his echo answers him over and over and over.

  You are too late. It is foolish to continue.

  Zachary reaches back and pulls the sword from its scabbard, holding it out against the darkness.

  You are already dead, you know.

  Zachary pauses and listens though he does not want to.

  You took a walk too early in the morning and collapsed from fatigue and stress and then hypothermia followed but your body has been buried in snow. No one will find you until spring melts it away. There is so much snow. Your friends think you are missing when in truth you are beneath their feet.

  “That’s not true,” Zachary says. He does not sound as certain as he would like to.

  You’re right, it isn’t. You have no friends. And all of this is a fabrication. Your brain’s feeble attempt to preserve itself. Telling itself a story with love and adventure and mystery. All of those things you wanted in your life that you were too busy playing your games and reading your books to go out and find. Your wasted life is ending, that is why you are here.

  “Shut up,” Zachary says to the darkness. He intended to shout it but his words are weak, not even strong enough to echo.

  You know this is true. You believe it because it is more believable than this nonsense. You are pretending. You have imagined these people and these places. You tell yourself a fairy tale because you are too afraid of the truth.

  The torchlight is fading. Cold like snow creeps over his skin.

  Let go. You will never find your way out. There is no way out. You are at the end now. Game over.

  Zachary forces himself to keep walking. He can no longer see where the path goes. He concentrates on one step and then another. He shivers.

  Give up. Giving up is easier. Giving up will be warmer.

  The torch goes out.

  You don’t have to be afraid of dying because you are already dead.

  Zachary tries to move forward but he cannot see.

  You are dead. You perished. There is no extra life. You had your chance. You played your game. You lost.

  Zachary falls to his knees. He had thought he had a sword, why would he have a sword? That’s so stupid.

  It is stupid. It’s nonsense. It is time you stopped fantasizing about swords and time travel and men who don’t lie to you and owl royalty and the Starless Sea. None of those things exist. You made them up. All of this is in your head. You can stop walking. There is nowhere to go. You’re tired of walking.

  He is tired of walking. Tired of trying. He doesn’t even know what he wants, what it is that he’s looking for.

  You don’t know what you want. You never did and you never will. It is over and done with. You have reached the end.

  There is a hand on Zachary’s arm. He thinks there is a hand on his arm. Maybe.

  “Don’t listen,” a different voice says near his ear. He doesn’t recognize the voice or its accent. Maybe British or Irish or Scottish or something. He is bad at accent identification like he is bad at everything else. “It lies,” this voice continues. “Don’t listen.”

  Zachary doesn’t know which voice to believe even though British-Irish-Scottish accents tend to sound official and important and the other voice didn’t have an accent but maybe there aren’t any voices at all maybe he should rest awhile. He tries to lie down but someone pulls at his arm.

  “We cannot stay here,” one of the voices insists. The British one.

  You imagined help for yourself, you are so desperate to believe. That’s pathetic.

  The hand releases his arm. There was never a hand there, there was nothing.

  A light flares, a sudden brightness sweeping over the space. For a second there is a tunnel and a path and huge wooden doors in the distance and then darkness again.

  You are a small, sad, unimportant man. None of this matters. Nothing you can do will have any impact on anything. You have already been forgotten. Stay here. Rest.

  “Get up,” the other voice says and the hand is there again, dragging Zachary forward.

  Zachary pulls himself awkwardly to his feet. The sword in his hand hits his leg.

  He does have a sword.

  No.

  The voice in the darkness changes. Before it was calm. Now it is angry.

  No, the darkness repeats as Zachary tries to move and someone—something—grabs ahold of his ankles, wrapping around his legs and trying to pull him down again.

  “This way,” the other voice says, more urgently now, leading him forward. Zachary follows, each step meeting with increased resistance from the ground. He tries to run but he can barely walk.

  He tightens his grip on the hilt of the sword. He focuses on the hand on his arm and not the other things that are sliding up his legs and around his neck though they feel just as real.

  He is not alone. This is happening.

  He has a sword and he is in a cavern beneath a lost city somewhere in the vicinity of the Starless Sea and he has lost track of Fate and he cannot see but he still believes, dammit.

  His feet move faster now, one step and then another and another, though the thing in the darkness follows, keeping pace as they continue down a path that ends at something that feels like a wall.

  “Wait,” the voice that is not the darkness says and the hand leaves Zachary’s arm, replaced by something that is not a hand, heavy and cold and curling around his shoulder.

  In front of him there is a sliver of light from an open door.

  The darkness makes a horrible sound that is not a scream but that is the closest word Zachary has for the screeching terror in his head and around it.

  It is so loud that Zachary stumbles and the darkness grabs at him, tearing at his shoes, curling around his legs, pulling him back. He loses his balance and falls, sliding backward, trying to hold on to the sword.

  Someone reaches an arm around his chest and pulls him toward the light and the door. Zachary cannot tell if the man or the darkness is stronger but with one arm he holds tight to his rescuer and with the other he stabs at the darkness with his sword.

  The darkness hisses at him.

  You don’t even know why you are here, it calls as Zachary is pulled into the light, the voices in his ears and in his head. They are using you—

  The doors close, muffling the voices, but they continue to shudder and shake, something on the other side trying to get in.

  “Help me with this,” the man says as he pushes against the doors, attempting to keep them closed. Zachary blinks, his eyes adjusting, but he can see the large wooden bar the man is struggling with and he gets to his feet, taking the other end of the heavy bar and sliding it into the metal braces set along the doors.

  The bar slips into place, securing the doors shut.

  Zachary leans his forehead against the doors and tries to steady his breathing. The doors are massive and carved and feel more real and solid beneath his skin with every passing second. He is alive. He is here. This is happening.

  Zachary sighs and looks up and around at the space that he has entered, and then at the man standing next to him.

  This space is a temple. The doors are one set of four that lead to an open atrium. It continues up and up and up in tiers surrounded by wooden stairs and balconies. Fires burn in hanging bowls, their moving light accentuated by the candles placed on every surface in lieu of offerings, dripping wax on carved
altars and on the shoulders and open palms of statues. Long banners of book pages strung from thread are draped over the balconies like flags, fluttering and freed from their bindings.

  Within this sanctuary of light, Zachary Ezra Rawlins and Simon Jonathan Keating stare at each other in bewildered silence.

  IT WAS EASIER than he anticipated, identifying her amongst the masked guests at the party. Initiating a conversation. Escalating it. Inviting her up to his hotel room, booked under a fictional name.

  He expected her to be more wary.

  He expected a lot of things from this evening that have not come to pass.

  Getting to this point was so easy that it nags at him, louder now that they are away from the party chatter and the music. This was too easy. Too easy to identify her with the bee and key and sword draped obviously and gaudily around her neck. Too easy to get her talking. Too easy to bring her upstairs, to a location without witnesses save for the city outside the window too filled with its own concerns to notice or care.

  It was all too easy and the ease of it bothers him.

  But it is also now too late.

  Now she stands by the window though there is not much of a view. Part of the hotel across the street, a corner of night sky with no visible stars.

  “Do you ever think about how many stories are out there?” she asks, placing a finger on the glass. “How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment? I wonder how long a book you would need to record them. You’d probably need an entire library to hold a single evening in Manhattan. An hour. A minute.”

  He thinks then that she knows why he is here and that’s why it was so easy and he can’t afford to hesitate any longer.

  There is a part of him that wants to remain in the charade, continue playing this part and wearing this mask.

  He finds he wants to keep talking with her. He is distracted by her question, thinking of all the other people in this city, all the stories filling this street, this block, this hotel. This room.

  But he has a job to do.

  He takes his weapon from his pocket as he approaches her.

  She turns and looks at him, wearing an expression he cannot read. She lifts her hand and rests her palm against the side of his face.

  He can tell where her heart is before he strikes. He doesn’t even have to look away from her eyes, the motion is so well-practiced it is almost automatic, a skill so honed he doesn’t have to think about it though here and now the not thinking bothers him.

  Then it is done, one of his hands pressed against the neckline of her gown and the other against her back to keep her from falling or pulling away. From a distance, viewed through the window, it would appear romantic, the long thin needle piercing her heart a detail lost in an embrace.

  He waits for her breath to catch, for her heart to stop.

  It does not.

  Her heart continues to beat. He can feel it beneath his fingers, stubborn and insistent.

  She continues to look up at him, though the expression in her eyes has changed and now he understands. Before she had been weighing him. Now he has been weighed and left wanting and her disappointment is as obvious and evident as the blood running down her back and through his fingers and the still-beating heart beneath his hand.

  She sighs.

  She leans forward, leans into him, pressing her drumming heart against his fingers and her breath, her skin, all of her is so impossibly alive in his arms that he is terrified.

  She reaches up, casual and calm, and removes his mask. She lets it fall to the ground as she stares in his eyes.

  “I am so very tired of the romance of the dead girl,” she says. “Aren’t you?”

  Dorian wakes with a start.

  He is in an armchair in the captain’s quarters of a pirate ship upon a sea of honey. He tries to convince his mind that the Manhattan hotel room was the dream.

  “Did you have a nightmare?” Eleanor asks from across the room. She is adjusting her maps. “I used to have nightmares and I would write them down and fold them up into stars and throw them away to be rid of them. Sometimes it worked.”

  “I will never be rid of this one,” Dorian tells her.

  “Sometimes they stay,” Eleanor says, nodding. She makes a change to the gold silk and collapses the maps again. “We’re almost there,” she says, and she goes out to the deck.

  Dorian spends another breath in a remembered hotel room before he follows her. He takes the knapsack she has given him containing a few potentially useful items, including a flask full of water though Eleanor claims he spent enough time in the honey that he shouldn’t be hungry or thirsty for a while. There is a pocketknife and a length of rope and a box of matches.

  She somehow found a pair of boots that fit him, tall and cuffed and quite piratey. They are almost comfortable. Along with his star-buttoned coat he looks like he walked out of a fairy tale. Maybe he did.

  He goes out to the deck and freezes in his boots at the sight in front of him.

  A dense forest of cherry trees in full bloom fills the cavern, all the way up to the edge of the river. Twisting tree roots disappear below the surface of the honey while stray blossoms fall and float downstream.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Eleanor says.

  “It’s beautiful,” Dorian agrees, though the single word cannot capture the way the sight of this long-beloved place is tearing at his heart.

  “I won’t be able to stop long with this current,” Eleanor explains. “Are you ready to go?”

  “I think so,” Dorian says.

  “When you find the inn tell the innkeeper I said hello, please,” Eleanor says.

  “I shall,” Dorian tells her. And because he knows he might not have another chance he adds: “I know your daughter.”

  “You know Mirabel?” Eleanor asks.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not my daughter.”

  “She’s not?”

  “Only because she’s not a person,” Eleanor clarifies. “She’s something else dressed up like a person, the way the Keeper is. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Dorian admits, though he would not have been able to explain it so simply. The dream that was all memory replays in his mind again, following through the rest of that night they spent together in a hotel bar as his world fractured and fell apart and Mirabel caught the pieces in the bottom of a martini glass. He wonders sometimes what might have happened, what he might have done, had she not stayed with him.

  “I think it’s probably hard to be not a person when you’re stuck inside a person,” Eleanor muses. “She always seemed very mad about everything. What is she like now?”

  Dorian doesn’t know how to answer the question. He feels a heartbeat in his fingers that is not there. For a moment, remembering, conjuring the idea of the person who is not a person, he feels again the way he felt that night, and underneath all the terror and confusion and wonder there is a perfect calm.

  “I don’t think she’s mad anymore,” he tells Eleanor. Though even as he says it he thinks perhaps that calm is more akin to the calm within a storm.

  Eleanor tilts her head, considering, and then she nods, seemingly pleased.

  Dorian wishes he could give Eleanor something for her kindness, in payment for the transportation. For saving his life, something that seems to run in the family.

  He has but one thing to give and he realizes now it was the fact that the book was not being read that bothered him more than the fact that it was not in his possession. Besides, he carries it with him always, in ink on his back and constantly unfolding in his head.

  Dorian takes Fortunes and Fables from the pocket of his coat.

  “I’d like you to have this,” he says, handing it to Eleanor.

  “It’s important to you,” she says. A statement and not a qu
estion.

  “Yes.”

  Eleanor turns the book over in her hands, frowning at it.

  “I gave a book that was important to me to someone a long time ago,” she says. “I never got it back. I’m going to get this back to you someday, is that all right?”

  “As long as you read it first,” Dorian says.

  “I will, I promise,” Eleanor says. “I hope you find your person.”

  “Thank you, my captain,” Dorian says. “I wish you a great many future adventures.” He bows at her and she laughs and here and now they separate to further their respective stories.

  Dorian’s disembarking is a complicated feat of ropes and a carefully managed jump and then he is standing on the shore watching the ship become smaller and smaller as it continues down the coast.

  From here he can read the text carved into its side:

  To Seek & to Find

  The ship becomes a glowing light in the distance and then it is gone and Dorian is alone.

  He turns to face the forest.

  They are larger cherry trees than he has ever seen, looming and gnarled, branches twisting in all directions, some high enough to skim the rock walls of the cavern high above and others low enough to touch, all weighted with thousands of pink blossoms. Roots and trunks grow through solid stone ground that cracks open around them.

  Paper lanterns are strung from branches, some from impossible heights, dotting the canopy like stars. They sway though there is no breeze.

  As Dorian walks into the forest there are occasional stumps between the trees. Some are covered in burning candles, dripping over the sides and onto the ground. Others are stacked with books and Dorian reaches to pick one up only to find that the books themselves are solid wood, part of the former tree, carved and painted.

  Blossoms drift down around him. A trail has been cleared and defined by markers on the trees, flat stones set into their roots with single candles burning on them. Dorian follows this path, quickly losing sight of the Starless Sea. He can no longer hear the sound of the waves against the shore.