The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  A shore.

  Zachary looks out at the sea. This is not the shore he stood on before, moments (was it moments?) before. It resembles it, including the cliffs behind him, but there are differences.

  On this shore there is a boat.

  A small rowboat, its oars neatly placed against its seat, half in the sea and half on the shore.

  Waiting for him.

  The sea surrounding it is blue. A bright, unnatural blue.

  Zachary dips a toe into the blue and it flutters.

  It is confetti. Paper confetti in varying shades of blue and green and purple, with white along the edges for the surf. As it stretches farther out from the shore there are streamers mixed in with it, long curls of paper pretending to be waves.

  Zachary looks up at the looming structure on the cliff behind him that is undoubtedly a castle, though it is constructed from painted cardboard. He can tell from here that it is only a facade, two walls with windows lacking structure and dimension. The idea of a castle painted and propped up to fool the eye from a greater distance than this.

  Beyond the castle there are stars: giant folded-paper stars hanging from strings that vanish into darkness. Shooting stars suspended mid-shoot and planets at various heights with and without rings. An entire universe.

  Zachary turns and looks out over the paper water.

  There is a city across the sea.

  This city is aglow with twinkling lights.

  The storm of emotions he has been tumbling through ceases, replaced by an unexpected calm.

  Zachary looks down at the boat. He picks up an oar. It is lightweight but solid in his hand.

  He pushes the boat out onto the paper sea and it stays afloat. It sends the confetti water shifting and swirling.

  Zachary looks across the sea at the city again.

  Apparently he isn’t finished with his quest.

  Not yet.

  Fate isn’t done with him, even in death.

  Zachary Ezra Rawlins steps into the boat and starts to row.

  excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins

  Hi notebook, it’s been awhile.

  Everything got sort of quiet. I didn’t know what to do after the lady in the bar and I got all paranoid for ages even about writing anything down or talking about anything so I put my head down and worked and time passed and nothing happened and now it’s summer.

  Well, one thing did happen and I didn’t write it down at the time.

  Someone gave me a key. It was in my campus mailbox. It’s a heavy brass key but the top of it is shaped like a feather, so it looks like a quill pen that ends in key teeth instead of a nib. It had a tag tied to it with string, like an old-fashioned package tag, and it said For Kat when the Time comes on it. I figured it was an invite to somebody’s thesis project but nothing ever followed up on it. I still have it. I put it on my key chain (the feather loops around at the top). I left the tag on. Guess I’m still waiting for the Time to come.

  I thought the bar lady would come back. Like it was the Refusal of the Call but I’m not on that kind of Hero’s Journey, I guess. It felt like the right decision at the time but you know, you wonder. What might have happened next?

  That’s what I started working on, even though it was unplanned. I wasn’t working, at all, for a while there and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I didn’t know what I wanted at all so I kept thinking about what is it that I want and kept coming back to telling stories in game form. I got to thinking all of this might be a halfway decent game if it were a game. Part spy movie, part fairy tale, part choose your own adventure. Epic branching story that doesn’t stick to a single genre or one set path and turns into different stories but it’s all the same story. I’m trying to play with the things you can do in a game that you can’t do in a book. Trying to capture more story. A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.

  You meet someone in a bar. You follow them or you don’t.

  You open a door. Or you don’t.

  Either way the point is: What happens next?

  It’s taking an absurd amount of notebooks full of possibilities but it’s getting somewhere.

  What happened next in Real Life™ is that I found Jocelyn Keating. Sort of.

  I found Simone Keating.

  Months ago I’d asked my friend Preeti in London to do some library detective work on the Keating Foundation for me if she could but then I didn’t hear anything so I’d figured she didn’t find anything but yesterday she texted me that she found some things and do I still want them.

  She probably thinks I’m nuts because I gave her a brand-new e-mail address and had her text me the second she sent everything so I could print it all immediately and then delete the e-mail. I told her to delete it after she sent it, too. Hopefully that’s enough. Told you: paranoid.

  Apparently back in the day there was this British library society that wasn’t an “official” library society. Mostly people who weren’t allowed in the standard societies. Lots of ladies, but not all.

  They seem kind of badass, in a nerdy way.

  It looks like it was an underground society, so there aren’t a lot of records.

  But some private library in London had a couple of files, someone had found them and tried to find more information to see if there was enough for an article or a book or something but nothing substantial ever came out of it.

  So there’s, like, no proper record that it was an official group but there are fragments of notebooks and a couple of photographs. Faded sepia images with people in amazing hats and ascots and all that taken in front of these beautiful bookshelves, the kind in cages where everything looks precious and fancy and possibly-disguising-secret-passages-y.

  The notebook pieces aren’t all that legible, and I’m reading, like, printouts of scans, but this is what I can make out:

  …catalogued doors in three additional cities. A. has not yet reported back from Edo. Awaiting response. Missed contact with…

  …suspects we are between incarnations. We exercise patience as our predecessors have before us and as we fear many of our successors will continue to. We shall do what we can to progress what has been put in motion.

  …spent more time below. The room is complete and believed to be functional. All now rests on faith. There has been discussion of scattering the archives for safety, J. has moved many of the papers to the cottage…

  That’s it. The rest is too faded to read or just partial numbers. I don’t know what it means. This would be easier if secret societies weren’t so secretive. There’s something else that’s all fragments about six doors and a place in some other place existing “out of time” and “the final incarnation” and I don’t know, it’s a little Gozer worshippy.

  Then there are the photographs.

  One photo has a blond lady sitting at a desk, not looking at the camera. Head down, hair swept up, reading a book. She’s wearing a necklace that might be heart-shaped, I can’t tell. Can’t tell how old she is, either.

  The back says Simone K. There’s a date but it’s so faded I can barely make out the 1 and the 8 that might be followed by a 6 or a 5, I can’t tell. Preeti said they didn’t have any other labels but guessed they might be 1860s. The journal pieces can’t be much later than that or they would have called it Tokyo instead of Edo.

  There’s a group shot, too. Thirteen people in front of the bookshelves, some standing and others sitting, all kind of looking like they’d rather be reading. It’s super blurry. I know people had to stand still for an absurdly long time for old-school photos but this looks like a particularly restless bunch. One of the ladies is smoking a pipe. Nobody’s in focus, plus the photo has water damage along the top and one side.

  But one of the names handwritten on the back says J. S. Keating. Well, you can read the J and the S and it’s either a K or an
H and an ing.

  If the names are in order she’s the blond lady standing second from the right, turned to say something or listen to the guy at the end who’s almost vanished with the water damage. Can’t make out his whole name on the back but it starts with an A. The lady is the same one from the Simone photo.

  Below the list of names it says: meeting of the owls.

  THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER rows a boat across an ocean made of paper.

  The structure on the shore behind him looks like a proper castle now. A light glows in an upper window. The shadow of a dragon curls around the highest tower.

  The oars dip into confetti and streamers, stirring them up in aquatic shimmers of blue and green though there is no sky here to reflect such colors.

  Zachary looks at the space where the sky should be, wondering if somewhere up there someone is making changes to this universe.

  Moving a small boat across an ocean. It must seem like nothing from such a distance. A tiny motion in a much larger tableau.

  It feels a lot bigger from down here in the center of the ocean.

  It takes a lot longer than he expects to reach the city across the sea.

  There are many lights along the skyline but Zachary rows toward the brightest one.

  As he gets closer he can see that it is a lighthouse.

  As he gets closer still he can tell the lighthouse has been imagined from a wine bottle with a candle burning in its neck.

  It is the opposite of the castle and its dragon, watching the shape of the city settle into buildings and towers surrounded by painted mountains and then resolve further into the objects they have been constructed from.

  The paper confetti around the boat ushers him onto the shore.

  Zachary pulls the boat up on the beach so the sea cannot take it away again.

  This shore is covered in sand, each grain enormous. But there is only a dusting of it. Beneath it there is a solid surface. Zachary brushes the sand away from a section of it near the boat and uncovers the polished mahogany of the desk this part of the world rests upon, its varnish scratched by sand and time.

  He walks from the beach onto green paper grass. He knows now where he is, even if he does not understand why he is here. He walks farther into the doll universe he had longed to see, though he never imagined viewing it from this perspective.

  Along the beach there are cliffs and caves and treasure chests and much more to explore but Zachary knows where he is going. He walks inland, the paper grass crunching beneath his bare feet.

  He walks past a toppled ruin of a temple and a snow-covered inn, the paper snowflakes scattered over the green of the grass.

  He crosses a bridge made of keys and a meadow filled with paper book-page flowers. He does not stop to read them.

  Some parts of the world reveal their pieces for what they are: paper and buttons and wine bottles. Others are perfect imitations in miniature.

  From far away they look like what they are meant to represent but as Zachary gets closer the textures are wrong. The artificiality bleeds through.

  A farmhouse is surrounded by balls of cotton pretending to be sheep.

  Above him folded-paper birds flutter on strings. Hanging, not flying.

  As Zachary continues walking the buildings grow more frequent. He loops through streets as the space becomes a city filled with tall cardboard buildings lined with unevenly spaced windows. He walks past a hotel and through an alleyway lined with lanterns and banners, decorated for a festival that is not occurring.

  The city becomes a smaller town. Zachary walks down a main street lined with buildings. Stores and restaurants and cocktail bars. A post office and a tavern and a library.

  Some of the buildings have toppled. Others have been reconstructed with tape and glue. Embellished and expanded and empty, even the ones that have figures posed within them, staring blankly out of windows or into wineglasses.

  This is the idea of a world without anything breathing life into it.

  The pieces without the story.

  It’s not real.

  The emptiness in Zachary’s chest aches for something real.

  He walks past a lone doll in a tailored suit with too-big stitches resting facedown in the middle of the street.

  Zachary tries to lift it but the porcelain cracks, breaking the doll’s arm, so he leaves it where it lies and continues on.

  At the top of a hill, overlooking the town, there is a house.

  It has a large front porch and a multitude of windows clouded over in amber. On its roof is a widow’s walk that would provide a view of the sea. Someone could have seen him coming from there, but the balcony is currently unoccupied.

  It looks more real than the rest of the world.

  The world that has been constructed around it with paper and glue and found objects.

  He can see the hinges on the side of the dollhouse. The lock keeping its facade in place.

  The lanterns on either side of the door are lit.

  Zachary walks up the steps of the dollhouse to the front porch.

  There is a humming sound. A buzz.

  The door is open.

  He has been expected.

  A sign hanging above the door reads:

  know thyself and learn to suffer

  The buzzing grows louder. It multiplies and changes and chatters and then resolves itself into words.

  Hellohellohellohellohellohello.

  Hello Mister Rawlins you are here at last hellohello.

  Hello.

  excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins

  It’s been more than a while this time, notebook. I reread because I didn’t remember where I left off.

  It’s weird, not being able to remember your own thoughts even when you wrote them down. Sometimes it’s like Kat from Before is just someone I passed on the street.

  I never found out anything else about Jocelyn Keating, I still haven’t remembered where I’ve heard of the Owl King before, I still don’t know what that key is for, I occasionally see someone watching me at the library and freak out about it, which is so much fun.

  I have trouble sleeping.

  And Z’s still missing.

  It’s been more than a year.

  I played a lot of phone tag with Z’s mom and I have all his stuff now, pulled out of university storage and sitting in boxes in my apartment. I keep telling his mom I can bring them to her but she insists I wait until after I graduate next May. Who am I to argue with a fortune-teller? Besides, Z has excellent taste in books so now I’m stocked up on reading material.

  I don’t really talk to people anymore, I know I should but it’s hard. I was seeing this guy who bartends at the Adjective Noun for a while and he was nice but I kind of let it fizzle. I didn’t return a text once and never heard from him again and now he’s always generic bartender pleasant to me when I go in there and it’s weird, like I imagined the whole thing and it didn’t actually happen.

  It’s like the photograph. I didn’t write about that here, but a few months ago I found a photograph online from that masquerade charity party. It was a gallery of images and one of them was a woman in a long white gown wearing a crown with a guy in a suit and it looked like they had either just stopped dancing or they were about to start. They looked like they knew each other. Neither of them were looking at the camera. She had her hand over his heart.

  I didn’t recognize the woman but the guy was Z. There was lens flare and she was in sharper focus, but it was totally him. He was wearing my mask.

  The photo didn’t have a caption.

  When I tried to load a larger image to save the file it gave me a Page Not Found error and I went over and over the galleries again and it was gone.

  I can see it, in my head. But lately I’m never sure I didn’t imagine it. I saw
what I wanted to see or something like that.

  I deleted all of my social media not long after that. I shut down my blog. I stopped baking, too, except for failed experiments in gluten-free puff pastry.

  I’ve tried to keep myself busy, though.

  My Notebooks of Endless Possibilities turned into my grad thesis and possibly more than that so I came to Manhattan for a meeting (still here, back to Vermont tomorrow) and the second day I was here I got a text from an unknown number.

  Hello, Kat. Northeast corner of Union Square, 1 p.m.

  Beneath it was a bee emoji, a key emoji, and a sword emoji.

  I went, because of course I did.

  The farmers’ market was set up in Union Square so the place was a zoo and it took me a while to find somewhere to stand and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for so I assumed someone was looking for me. Sure, following anonymous text instructions was sketchy but the middle of a crowded street corner seemed safe enough and, fine, whatever. I was curious.

  I was there for about three minutes when my phone buzzed again with another text.

  Look up.

  I looked up. It took me a minute but then I spotted the girl standing in an upper window of the ginormous Barnes and Noble, looking down at me, holding up one hand like she was going to wave but she wasn’t waving. She had a phone in her other hand that she started typing on once she saw me see her.

  I recognized her. She’d come to my classes a few times around when Z disappeared but then I didn’t see her after that January. She was a knitter. She’d helped perfect my golden stitch pattern. We’d had a cool conversation about overlapping narratives, too, and how no single story is ever the whole story. Sarah something.

  She was there, then, and I hadn’t ever thought of her. Not once.

  The pay phone next to me started ringing. Seriously. I didn’t even think those worked, I had them categorized in my mind as nostalgic street-art objects.

  Another text buzzed my phone. Answer it. I looked up again. She had two phones, one was up to her ear and she was texting on the other. Figures. Never enough phones.