The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  But there’s something about a foundation and instructions for donations and how does a lady leave her library to a bunch of different universities in different countries when some of them didn’t even exist when she died? I mean, seriously, even if she lived to be a hundred this school was founded, like…longhand math, boo…something like forty or fifty years after that?

  Elena helped me find some of the other donated books and some of them are, like, way too modern to belong to a lady in 18whatever. There’s Jazz Age stuff in there. Maybe it wasn’t *her* library, maybe it was a library named after her? Or it’s just the foundation and the name is a carry-over from something earlier. I can’t find info about the Keating Foundation anywhere, it’s like it’s not a thing.

  One of those books had that bee drawing in it again. Bee-key-sword in faded ink along the back cover underneath the barcode sticker.

  This is all so weird. And not, like, good weird. I love a good weird.

  * * *

  —

  I shut down my Twitch account because someone keeps spamming my chat with bee emotes.

  I got a text on my phone from Unknown that says Stop snooping, Miss Hawkins.

  I didn’t reply.

  All my texts to or from Z are gone.

  THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER sits in a chair surrounded by keys in the middle of a starlit forest talking to a woman made of snow and ice.

  At first he does not know what to say.

  He does not think of himself as a storyteller. He never has.

  He thinks of all the tales he grew up feasting on, myths and fairy tales and cartoons.

  He remembers Sweet Sorrows and its test for keepers, the storytelling surrounded by keys and how they could tell any story but their own, but he does not have a story.

  He has nothing practiced. Nothing prepared. But the request is so open-ended.

  Tell me a story.

  The request comes with no specifications or requirements.

  So Zachary begins to speak, haltingly at first but gradually becoming more comfortable, as though he is talking to an old friend in a dimly lit bar over well-crafted cocktails instead of sitting in a snow-covered fairy-tale wood addressing a silent effigy.

  He starts with an eleven-year-old boy finding a painted door in an alleyway. He describes the door in great detail, down to its painted keyhole. He tells her how the boy did not open it. How afterward he wished that he had and how at odd moments over the following years he would think about it, how the door haunted him and how it haunts him, still.

  He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional.

  He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will.

  He tells her things he has never told anyone.

  About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn’t discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how he feels now long after the end of it the feeling is just a void.

  He tells her how the university library became a touchstone for him after that, how when he felt himself falling he would go and find a new book and fall into it instead and be someone somewhere else for a while. He describes the library down to its unreliable lightbulbs and finding Sweet Sorrows and how that moment unexpectedly changed all the moments that followed.

  He reads Sweet Sorrows to her, relying on memory when the starlight is not enough to illuminate the words. He tells her Dorian’s fairy tales about castles and swords and owls, about lost hearts and lost keys and the moon.

  He tells her how he always felt like he was searching for something, always thinking about that unopened door and how disappointed he felt once he went through another painted door and that feeling still didn’t go away but how for just a moment in a gilded ballroom preserved in time it did. He found what he had been seeking, a person not a place, a particular person in this particular place, and then the moment and the place and the person were gone.

  He recounts everything that followed, from the elevator crash to the voices in the darkness to finding Simon in his sanctuary attempting to record the story and out through the snow and past the phantasmagoric holiday party and into the woods with the stag until he brings his story into the clearing that they currently inhabit, describing it down to the details of the ships carved into her gown.

  Then, with nothing left to tell that he has carried with him, Zachary makes things up.

  He wonders aloud where one of the frozen ships in her gown is heading and as he speaks the ship moves, sailing out over the icy waves, away from Mirabel and across the snow.

  The forest changes around it, the trees fading as the ship sails through them but Zachary remains in his chair and the ice version of Mirabel stays with him, listening, as he finds his way forward, slow and stumbling when the words won’t come but he waits and he does not chase it, he follows the ship and the story where they wish to go.

  As the ship sails the snow melts around it, waves swirling and crashing against its hull.

  He pictures himself on this ship as it crosses the sea. Dorian is there and so is his lost owl companion. He adds his Persian cat for good measure.

  Zachary imagines a place where the ship is going, not to take its inhabitants home but to bring them somewhere undiscovered. He sails the ship and the story to places it has not yet traveled.

  Through time and fate and past the moon and the sun and the stars.

  Somewhere there is a door, marked with a crown and a heart and a feather, that has not been opened.

  He can see it right in front of him, shimmering in the shadows. Someone holds a key that will open it. Beyond the door there is another Harbor on the Starless Sea, alive with books and boats and waves washing against stories of what was and what will be.

  Zachary follows the stories and the ship as far as he can and then he brings them back. To right here and right now. To this snow-covered moment that is once again surrounded by a forest covered in keys.

  Here he stops.

  The ship anchors itself back in the frozen gown with its monsters.

  Zachary sits with Mirabel, together in the post-story silence.

  He has no idea how much time has passed, if any time has passed at all.

  After the silence he stands and walks over to his audience. He takes a small bow, leaning in toward her.

  “Where does it end, Max?” he whispers in her ear.

  Her head turns swiftly toward him, staring at him with blank ice eyes.

  Zachary freezes, too surprised to move as she lifts her hand and reaches not for him but for the key dangling from his neck.

  She takes the long thin key that was hidden in Fortunes and Fables, separating it from the compass and the sword and holds it on her palm. A layer of frost forms over the key.

  She rises from her chair, pulling Zachary upright with the motion. Her gown crumbles, sending the ships and the sailors and the sea monsters within its tides down into their icy graves.

  Then she pushes her palm and the key upon it against Zachary’s chest, between the open buttons of his coat.

  Her hand is so cold that it burns, pressing the white-hot metal into his skin.

  With her other hand she reaches out and pulls him closer, winding her icy fingers through his hair and drawing his lips to hers.

  Everything is too hot and too cold and Zachary’s entire world is an imagined kiss in brightest darkness that tastes like honey and snow and flame.

 
There is a tightness in his chest that grows and burns and he can no longer tell where the ice ends and he begins and just when he thinks he can tolerate no more it shatters and stops.

  Zachary opens his eyes and tries to catch his breath.

  The ice likeness of Mirabel is gone.

  The key is missing, leaving the sword and compass abandoned on the chain. The burned impression of the key is marked on Zachary’s chest and will remain there always.

  The rest of the keys have vanished as well, along with their trees.

  Zachary is no longer in the woods.

  He stands now in a snow-covered alleyway that never, if it still existed in its true form, would contain such snow.

  There is a new figure carved from ice with him now. A smaller one, bespectacled and curly-haired, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a backpack, facing a brick wall that is not ice but genuine brick, most of it whitewashed and pale, blending in with the snow.

  Upon the wall there is an intricately painted door.

  The colors are rich, some of the pigments metallic. In the center, at the level where a peephole might be and stylized with lines that match the rest of the painted carving, there is a bee.

  Beneath the bee there is a key. Beneath the key there is a sword.

  Zachary reaches out to touch the door, his fingertips meeting the door between the bee and the key, and they come to rest on smooth paint covering cool brick, a slight unevenness to the surface betraying the texture below.

  It is a wall. A wall with a pretty picture on it.

  A picture so perfect as to fool the eye.

  Zachary turns back to the ghost of his younger self but the figure is gone. The snow is gone. He is alone in an alleyway standing in front of a painted door.

  The light has changed. A predawn glow chases away the stars.

  Zachary reaches for the painted doorknob and his hand closes over cold metal, round and three-dimensional.

  He opens the door and steps through it.

  And so the son of the fortune-teller finds his way to the Starless Sea.

  DORIAN NAVIGATES THE DEPTHS with Fate’s heart in its box carefully wrapped and contained in a pack strapped to his back and a sword that is much more ancient than him but not nearly as ancient as the things staring at him from the shadows and all of them are still sharp.

  A sword does not forget how to find its mark when it is held by a hand that knows how to use it.

  Its blade and the sleeves of Dorian’s star-buttoned coat are covered in blood.

  There are…things that have followed him since he left the inn and more that have joined them as he walks on.

  Things that want his life and his flesh and his dreams.

  Things that would crawl under his skin and wear him like a coat.

  They have not had a mortal come so close to tempt them in countless years.

  They change their shapes around him. They use his own stories against him.

  It is not what Dorian had expected, even with the moon’s warnings.

  It all feels too real.

  One moment he is in a cavern, his gaze trained on a distant light, and the next he is walking on a city street. He can feel the sunlight on his skin and smell the exhaust from the passing cars.

  He trusts nothing that he sees.

  Dorian continues down a crowded city sidewalk in what would pass for midtown Manhattan if it were not looked at too closely. He dodges pedestrians with practiced skill.

  Businessmen and tourists and small children turn and stare as he passes.

  Dorian avoids making eye contact with anyone or anything but then he reaches a familiar landmark flanked by two large cats.

  He never realized before just how big Patience and Fortitude are. The two larger-than-life-size lions track him with glossy black eyes that do not belong to them.

  Dorian pauses in front of the library stairs, tightening his grip on his sword, wondering if stone lions will bleed the way everything else this place puts in his way has bled.

  He braces himself, waiting for the lions to pounce, but instead something grabs him from behind, wrapping around his neck and pulling him into the street.

  It slams Dorian into the side of a taxi, the screeching of horns throwing off his equilibrium, but he maintains his grip on his sword and when he recovers his balance he swings and the sword meets its target, swift and certain.

  The thing that he cuts down looks first like a briefcase-wielding businessman and then like an amorphous, many limbed shadow, and then a small child, screaming, and then nothing.

  The street and the taxis and the library and the lions fade along with it, leaving Dorian alone in an expansive cavern.

  Above him the starless darkness is so vast that he could almost believe it is sky.

  There is a castle in the distance. A light glows in the window of its highest tower. Dorian can see it and the softly glowing shore it rests above. He keeps his sights set on it, as the castle does not shift and change the way the rest of the world down here does and he uses it like a lighthouse to guide his way.

  Blood that is not his own pools in his boots, seeping in through each footstep.

  Beneath his feet the ground changes, shifting from stone to wood. Then it begins to tilt, swaying over waves that are not really there.

  He is on a ship. Sailing over open ocean beneath a bright night sky.

  Standing on the deck in front of him there is a figure in a fur coat that appears to be Allegra but he knows it is not Allegra.

  They are trying to disarm him.

  Dorian tightens his grip on the sword.

  excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins

  They’re watching me now. Literally right now as I’m writing this.

  I’m at the Noodle Bar and while I was in line to order my ramen this random guy behind me starts chatting me up, like, asked about my “a well-read woman is a dangerous creature” t-shirt and if I’ve tried some other ramen place nearby and then while I was ordering he dropped something in my bag, I don’t know if it’s a bug or something, I’m waiting until he leaves and then I’ll dump everything out and check. The guy is currently sitting on the other side of the restaurant at what’s probably a “respectable” distance. He has his nose in a book, I recognize the cover but can’t see the title. Some new-release front-table thing. But he’s not reading. He has it opened to somewhere near the end but the dust jacket’s like, too pristine for mostly finished reading and it’s that type of jacket that totally gets fingerprints on it, especially if you read and eat at the same time.

  I might be getting too good at this.

  But he’s hardly looking at the book and barely eating his noodles. He sucks at subtlety. He’s watching me write. Eyeing up my journal like he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to snag it when I’m not looking.

  I’m always looking now.

  You will pry this Adventure Time notebook from my cold dead hands, ya ding-dong.

  * * *

  —

  It kind of reminds me of that guy who was watching Z at the Gryphon that night but this guy is younger and not as silver-fox-in-training cute.

  (Tried to track that guy down, too, awhile ago. Asked the waitresses and the bartenders but only one waitress remembered him—said she tried to flirt with him and he shot her down but was nice about it—but she hadn’t seen him before or since.)

  This guy has now figured out that I am not leaving before he does. No way. I will find some back-door-through-the-kitchen spy-movie-escape-route nonsense if he tries to out-sit me.

  * * *

  —

  Later now. I won the ramen-place standoff, the guy eventually left, super slow and reluctant like he wanted to linger over the remains of his noodle bowl.

  Never turned more than two pages of that book in ov
er half an hour.

  I took a long looping route in the wrong direction when I left and now I’ve stopped in the park to dump out my bag.

  There’s a tiny little button transmitter, like, watch-battery size and kinda sticky, so it stayed on the inside of the bag even after I dumped it and I never would have found it if I hadn’t noticed him drop it in there. I don’t know if it’s a GPS or a microphone or what.

  This is all really weird.

  * * *

  —

  Home now.

  I bought an extra chain for my door and a motion detector on my way home.

  Then I baked cinnamon sour cream cookies and mixed myself a clover club since I had the eggs out already and started a comfort replay of Dark Souls and now I feel a little better about life and myself and existence.

  Every time the screen says You Died I feel better.

  You Died.

  You Died and the world keeps going.

  You Died and it wasn’t so bad, was it? Have a cookie.

  * * *

  —

  I just sat and cried for half an hour but I kind of feel better.

  I think Z’s dead. There, I said it. I wrote it down, anyway.

  I think at some point I stopped looking for him and started looking for why and now the why is messing with me.

  * * *

  —

  I stuck that possibly-tracking-device thing on a cat in the park.

  THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER walks through a door and into a wide open cavern, far, far below the surface of the earth. Below the harbors, below the cities, below the books.

  (The single book he carries is the first to be brought so deep. The stories here have never been bound in such a fashion, they are left loose and wild.)