If I’m even remembering it right. I don’t know anymore. I’m pretty sure I remember her, at least.
I remember we laughed a lot and I remember I’d been upset or sad about something or other before we’d started talking and afterward I wasn’t.
I remember I kind of wanted to kiss her but I also didn’t want to ruin it, and I didn’t want to be the drunk girl who kisses everyone at the party even though I’ve been that girl before.
I remember wishing that I’d gotten her number but I didn’t or if I did I lost it.
I do know I never saw her again. I would have remembered. She was hot.
She had pink hair.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER is guided by giant bees down a staircase within a dollhouse to where a basement would be though rather than a basement there is now an expansive ballroom made of honeycomb, shimmering and gold and beautiful.
It is ready Mister Rawlins there is not much time left but here you go here is the place that you wanted the dancing talking place the story sculptor is waiting for you inside tell her we said hello please thank you.
The buzzing quiets, drowned out by the music as Zachary descends to the ballroom. Some jazz standard he recognizes but could not name.
The room is crowded with dancing ghosts. Transparent figures in timeless formal wear and masks conjured from glitter and honey, luminous and swirling over a polished wax floor patterned with hexagons.
It is the idea of a party constructed by bees. It doesn’t feel real, but it does feel familiar.
The dancers part for Zachary as he walks and then he can see her across the room. Solid and substantial and here.
Mirabel looks exactly as she did the first time he saw her, dressed as the king of the wild things, though her hair is its proper pink beneath her crown and her gown has been embellished: The draping white cloth is now embroidered with barely visible illustrations in white thread of forests and cities and caverns laced together with honeycomb and snowflakes.
She looks like a fairy tale.
When he reaches her Mirabel offers her hand and Zachary accepts it.
Here now in a ballroom made of wax and gold, Zachary Ezra Rawlins begins his last dance with Fate.
“Is this all in my head?” Zachary asks as they twirl amongst the golden crowd. “Am I making all of this up?”
“If you were, whatever answer I gave you would also be made up, wouldn’t it?” Mirabel answers.
Zachary doesn’t have a good response for that particular observation.
“You knew that would happen,” he says. “You made all of this happen.”
“I did not. I gave you doors. You chose whether or not you opened them. I don’t write the story, I only nudge it in different directions.”
“Because you’re the story sculptor.”
“I’m just a girl looking for a key, Ezra.”
The music changes and she guides him into a turn. The incandescent ghosts around them spin.
“I don’t remember all of the times I died,” Mirabel continues. “I remember some with perfect clarity and other lifetimes fade one into the next. But I remember drowning in honey and for a moment, smothered in stories, I saw everything. I saw a thousand Harbors and I saw the stars and I saw you and me here and now at the end of it all but I didn’t know how we’d get here. You asked for me, didn’t you? I can’t really be here since I’m not dead.”
“But you’re…shouldn’t you be able to be wherever you want?”
“Not really. I’m in a vessel. An immortal one this time, but still a vessel. Maybe I am whatever I was before again. Maybe I’m something new now. Maybe I’m just myself. I don’t know. As soon as there’s an unquestionable truth there’s no longer a myth.”
They dance in silence for a moment while Zachary thinks about truth and myth, and the other dancers circle them.
“Thank you for finding Simon,” Mirabel says after the pause. “You set him back on his path.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. He’d still be hiding in temples if you hadn’t brought him back into the story. Now he’s where he needs to be. It’s sort of like being found. That was all unforeseen, they did so much planning to have me conceived outside of time and no one ever stopped to think about what would happen to my parents after the fact and then everything got complicated. You can’t end a story when parts of it are still running around lost in time.”
“That’s why Allegra wanted to keep the book lost, isn’t it? And Simon and his hand.”
Zachary glimpses another couple out of the corner of his eye and for a moment it looks as though the glimmering man in the coat quite similar to his own dancing next to them is missing his left hand, but then it catches the light, transparent but there.
“Allegra saw the end,” Mirabel says. “She saw the future coming on its wings and she did everything she could think to do to prevent it, even things she didn’t want to do. She wished she could preserve the present and keep her beloved Harbor the way it was but everything got tangled and restricted. The story kept fading and the bees wandered back down to where they started. They followed the story for a very long time through Harbor after Harbor but if things don’t change the bees stop paying as much attention. The story had to end closer to the sea in order to find the bees again. I had to trust that someday someone would follow the story all the way down. That there could be one story to tie all of the others together.”
“The bees said hello, by the way,” Zachary tells her. “What happens next?”
“I don’t know what happens next,” Mirabel answers. “Truly, I don’t,” she adds, in response to the look Zachary gives her. “I spent a very long time trying to get to this point and it seemed such an impossible goal that I didn’t give much thought to what waited beyond it. This is a nice touch, back to the beginning and all. I didn’t think we’d get to finish our dance. Sometimes dances are left unfinished.”
Zachary has a thousand questions still to ask but instead he pulls Mirabel closer and rests his head against her neck. He can hear her heartbeat thrumming, slow and steady, in time with the music.
There is nothing now save for this room and this woman and this story. He can feel the way the story spreads out from this point, through space and through time and so much farther than he ever imagined but this is the beating, buzzing heart of it. Right here and right now.
He’s calm again. Relieved to have his Max back and even though he knows they both have other people they belong with there is still this room and this dance and this moment and it matters, maybe more than any of the others.
There is a humming noise all around them beyond the walls. The dancing ghosts fade one after another until only the two of them are left.
“I don’t know if you will ever understand how grateful I am, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “For everything.”
The music falters and the ballroom begins to shake. One of the walls cracks. Honey seeps up from the floor.
There is not much time left Mister Rawlins sir you had your dance the story is over we really must be going.
The buzzed warning comes from all around them.
“I missed it,” Zachary says. “I missed so much.” He is not really talking about the story.
“You’re here for the end,” Mirabel says. It doesn’t make him feel better.
“What happens now?” Zachary asks, as now seems suddenly more meaningful than next.
“That’s not up to me, Ezra. Like I said, I don’t make things happen, I just provide opportunities and doors. Someone else has to open them.”
Mirabel reaches out and traces a line in the honeycomb wall with her finger and then another and another until they are roughly the shape of a door.
She draws a doorknob for it and pulls it open. There is a starlit wood beyond it, the tree branches heavy with leaves. The waves
of honey around their feet lap at the grass but do not pass through the door.
“Goodbye, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “Thank you.”
She gives him a bow. The end of a dance.
“You’re welcome, Max.”
He bows to her in return, slow to rise again, expecting her to be gone by the time he looks up but instead she has come back and she is right in front of him and she kisses him, a brief, light brush of her lips against his cheek like a parting gift. A stolen moment before the end laced with honey and inevitability. It is not entirely sweet. Then Mirabel turns and walks through the door.
The door closes behind her and melts away into the wax wall, leaving Zachary alone in an empty, collapsing ballroom.
It is time to go Mister Rawlins sir.
“Go where?” Zachary asks but the buzzing has stopped. The honey swirling around Zachary’s feet is getting higher. He makes his way to the stairs and up into the dollhouse. The honey follows him.
Back inside the dollhouse the bees are gone.
The porcelain doll has vanished from the sunroom.
Zachary tries to open the front door but it has been sealed closed with wax.
He climbs the dollhouse stairs and passes unoccupied doll bedrooms and closets until he finds another flight of honey-sticky stairs that lead to an attic filled with forgotten memories and within the attic there is a ladder, leading to a door in the ceiling.
Zachary pushes it open and climbs out to the top of the dollhouse. He stands on the widow’s walk, staring out at the sea. Honey bubbles up through the paper confetti, turning the blue sea golden.
The bees are swarming over the roof below him. They buzz at him as they begin to fly up and away.
Goodbye Mister Rawlins thank you for being the key you were a good key and a nice person we wish you well in your future endeavors.
“What future endeavors?” Zachary yells at the bees but the bees do not answer. They fly off into the darkness, past models of planets and stars, leaving Zachary alone with only the sound of the sea. He misses the buzzing as soon as it is gone.
And now the sea is rising.
The honey sweeps over the paper grass and mixes with the sea. The lighthouse falls, its light extinguished. The honey steals the shore away and pulls the buildings down, insistent and impatient.
There is only one sea now, consuming the universe.
The sea has reached the house. The lock on the dollhouse breaks as the waves sweep through the open door and up the stairs. The facade falls, cracking open the honeycomb interior.
The rowboat is floating, not near enough to reach easily but Zachary is out of options. The world is sinking.
Being dead should not feel this perilous.
The honey is up to his knees.
This is really the end, he thinks. There is no world beneath this world.
There is nothing that comes after this.
The reality of it all is setting in as the dollhouse sinks below him.
The end is here and Zachary fights it.
He pulls himself up on the guardrail and dives for the boat. He slips, falling into the honey sea and the honey embraces him like a long-lost love.
He grabs for the edge of the boat but his honey-coated hands are too slippery to hold on.
The boat capsizes.
This Starless Sea claims Zachary Ezra Rawlins for its own.
It pulls him under and refuses to let him surface.
He gasps for a breath his lungs do not require and around him the world breaks.
Open.
Like an egg.
RHYME STANDS ON the highest step on a flight of stairs that once led down to the ballroom and currently descend into an ocean of honey.
She knows this story. She knows it by heart. Every word, every character, every change. This tale has buzzed in her ears for years but it is one thing to hear and quite another to see the sinking.
She has pictured it in her mind a thousand and one times but this is different. The sea is darker, the surf rougher and foaming as it clings to the stone and pulls books and candles and furniture down in its wake, stray pages and bottles of wine finding their way to the surface again before succumbing to their fate.
The honey always moved more slowly in Rhyme’s imagination.
It is time to go. It is past time, but Rhyme remains standing and watching the tide ebb and rise until the honey reaches her feet and only then does she turn, the hem of her robes sticky and heavy as she walks away from the sea.
The Starless Sea follows Rhyme as she winds her way through rooms and halls, creeping at her heels as she takes these last steps, bearing final witness to this place.
Rhyme hums to herself as she walks and the sea listens. She pauses at a wall carved with vines and flowers and bees that does not appear to contain a door but Rhyme takes a coin-size disk of metal from her pocket and places the bee on it into the bee-shaped carving and the gateway into the Archive opens for her.
The honey follows at her feet, pooling into the room, stretching through the hidden stacks and shelves.
Rhyme passes the empty spot on the shelf where Sweet Sorrows would have been were it not stolen by a rabbit a long time ago and another vacancy where she pulled The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor from its place in the Archive, not so very long ago at all, comparatively.
Rhyme considers whether giving people pieces of their own stories is somehow cheating Fate or not and decides that Fate probably doesn’t mind one way or another.
Two volumes misplaced over so much time is not that bad, Rhyme thinks, looking up at the shelves. There are thousands of them, the stories of this place. Translated and transcribed by every acolyte who walked these halls before her. Bound together in volumes of single narratives or combined in overlapping pieces.
The stories of a place are not easily contained.
It sounds strange and empty now, in her head. Rhyme can hear the hum of past stories though they are low and quiet, the stories always calm once they have been written down whether they are past stories or present stories or future stories.
It is the absence of the high-pitched stories of the future that is the most strange. There is the thrum of what will pass in the next few minutes buzzing in her ears—so faint compared to the tales layered upon tales that she once heard—and then nothing. Then this place will have no more tales to tell. It took her so long to learn to decipher them and write them down so that they bore any resemblance to the way they unfolded in her ears and in her mind and now they’re almost gone. She hopes whoever wrote these last moments did them justice, she did not write them herself but she can tell from the way that they buzz in her ears they have already been recorded.
Rhyme takes one last walk through the Archive, saying her silent goodbyes and letting the stories hum around her before she continues upward.
She leaves the door to the Archive open, to let the sea inside.
The Starless Sea follows Rhyme up stairways and through halls and gardens, claiming statues and memories and oh so many books.
The electric lights flicker and die, plunging the space into darkness, but there are enough candles for Rhyme to see by. She lit her path earlier, knowing she would need the flames to guide her way.
The scent of burning hair greets Rhyme as she reaches the Heart. She does not knock on the door to the Keeper’s office as she enters, nor does she comment on his clipped-short hair or the tangle of braids burning in the fireplace, their strung pearls charring and falling into the ashes.
One pearl for each year he has spent in this space.
He never told her that, but he did not have to. Rhyme knows his story. The bees have whispered it to her.
The Keeper’s robes are folded neatly on a chair and he now wears a tweed suit that was already out of fashion the last time it was worn which was quite so
me time ago. He is sitting at his desk, writing by candlelight. This fact makes Rhyme feel better about having taken so long, but she always knew they would wait until the last moment to depart.
“Are all of the cats out?” the Keeper asks without looking up from his notebook.
Rhyme points at the ginger cat on the desk.
“He’s being stubborn,” the Keeper admits. “We shall have to take him with us.”
He continues to write while Rhyme watches. She could read his rushed inscriptions if she cared to but she knows what they are. Invocations and supplications. Blessings and yearnings and wishes and warnings.
He is writing to Mirabel as he always has, as he has continued to write through the years she has been with Zachary in the depths, writing as though he is speaking to her, as though she can hear each word as it materializes on the paper like a whisper in her ear.
Rhyme wonders if he knows that Mirabel hears him, has always heard him, will always hear him through distance and lifetimes and a thousand turning pages.
This is not where our story ends, he writes. This is only where it changes.
The Keeper puts his pen down and closes the notebook.
He looks up at Rhyme.
“You should change,” he says, looking at her robes and her honey-soaked shoes.
Rhyme unties her robes and takes them off. Beneath them she wears the same clothes she wore when she first arrived: her old school uniform with its plaid skirt and white button-down shirt. It did not seem right to wear anything else for the departure despite the fact that it feels like wearing a past life and the shirt is now too small. The honey-soaked shoes will have to suffice.
The Keeper, seeming not to notice the encroaching waves, stands and pours a glass of wine from a bottle on the desk. He offers to pour another for Rhyme but she declines.
“Don’t fret,” the Keeper says to Rhyme, watching her as she watches the sea. “It is all here,” he says, placing a fingertip on Rhyme’s forehead. “Remember to let it out.”
The Keeper hands her his fountain pen. Rhyme smiles at the pen and places it in the pocket of her skirt.
The Starless Sea Page 46
