“Thanks,” Zachary says and heads out to the atrium while Elena ducks through a door into a librarian-exclusive passageway. She reappears behind the circulation desk before he even reaches it.
“Which book?” she asks, flexing her fingers over the keyboard.
“The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology,” Zachary says. “Bulfinch.”
“That’s on the list, isn’t it?” Elena says. “Could you not find it?”
“I did but I think someone picked it up while I wasn’t looking,” Zachary says, tired of book-related falsifications.
“This says we have two copies and neither one is checked out,” Elena says, looking at the screen. “Oh, but one of those is an e-book. Anything that’s out and about here should be shelved again by tomorrow morning. I can check those out for you, too.”
“Thanks,” Zachary says, handing her the books and his ID. He somehow doubts the book will be returning to its shelf anytime soon. “For everything, I mean. I appreciate it.”
“Anytime,” Elena says, handing his books back to him.
“And read some Hammett, please,” Zachary adds. “Chandler’s great but Hammett’s better. He was an actual detective.”
Elena laughs and one of the other librarians shushes her. Zachary gives her a wave as he leaves, relishing the librarian-on-librarian shushing.
Outside in the snow everything is crystal clear and too bright. Zachary heads back to his dorm, turning over in his mind the possibilities of what might have happened to the vanished book and not settling on anything.
He is relieved that he kept Sweet Sorrows in his bag today.
As he walks he thinks of something he hasn’t tried yet and feels rather stupid about it. When he gets back to his room he drops his bag on the floor and heads straight for his computer.
He googles “Sweet Sorrows” first even though he expects what he gets: pages upon pages of Shakespeare quotes and bands and articles about sugar consumption. He searches for bees and keys and swords. The results are a mix of Arthurian legends and lists of items from Resident Evil. He attempts various combinations and finds a bee and a key on the coat of arms of a fictional magic school. He notes the name of the book and the author, curious as to whether or not the symbology is coincidental.
At several points in Sweet Sorrows the place is referred to as the Harbor on the Starless Sea, but a search for “Starless Sea” turns up little more than a Dungeon Crawl Classic that sounds appropriate but unrelated and Google suggests that perhaps he meant Sunless Sea either in reference to an upcoming video game or as a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem.
Zachary sighs. He tries image searches and scrolls through page after page of cartoons and skeletons and dungeon masters and then something catches his eye.
He clicks the image to enlarge it.
The black-and-white photograph looks candid and not posed, maybe even cropped from a larger image. A woman in a mask, her head turned away from the camera, leaning in to listen to the man standing next to her who is also masked and wearing a tuxedo. There are several indistinguishable people around them, it looks like it might have been taken at a party.
Around the woman’s neck is a series of three layered chains with a charm hanging from each one.
Zachary clicks the image again to view it full-size.
Hanging from the top chain is a bee.
Below it is a key.
Below the key is a sword.
Zachary clicks again to view the page the image came from, a post on a pinboard site asking if anyone knows where to buy the necklace.
But beneath that there is a source link for the photo.
Zachary clicks the link with a hand over his mouth and finds himself staring at a photo gallery.
Algonquin Hotel Annual Literary Masquerade, 2014.
Another click informs him that this year’s event is three days away.
There is a door in a forest that was not always a forest.
The door is no longer a door, not entirely. The structure that held it collapsed some time ago and the door fell along with it and now lies on the ground rather than standing upright.