“They are quite strict about their protocols but some are more strict than others,” Dorian says, his pace quickening as they continue. “Always answer the door is one of the stricter ones and it will take priority. Now, the room will have books on shelves and in glass cases. You are concerned with the cases. In one of the cases there will be a book bound in brown leather, with faded gilding around the page edges. You will know which one it is. You will swap your Bulfinch’s mythology for that book. Place that book in your coat while in that room, there are cameras in the halls. Best keep your head down in general but I don’t think anyone monitoring will recognize you based on your photo.”
“They have a photo of me?” Zachary asks.
“They have a yearbook photo that looks nothing like you, don’t worry about it. Return the way you came, down the stairs but when you reach the main hall go around to the back of the stairs. From there you can go down to the basement and out the back door. That door leads to the garden and there’s a gate at the back, go out the gate and turn right. Proceed to the end of the alley and back to the street. I’ll be waiting across the street, when I see you I’ll start walking. Follow me for six blocks and if you are certain no one has followed you, catch up with me. This is it,” Dorian says, stopping at a partially shadowed corner. “Halfway down the block on the left, grey building, black door, number 213. Do you have any questions?”
“Yes I have questions,” Zachary says, louder than he means to. “Who the hell are you, anyway? Where did you come from? Why can’t you do this yourself? What’s so important about this particular book and who are these people really and what did the mouse do with Fate’s heart? Who is Mirabel and at what point during all this covert activity am I allowed to go back to my hotel to get my face windows? Eyeglasses. Spectacles.”
Dorian sighs and turns toward Zachary, his face half in light and half in shadow and Zachary realizes now that he is younger than he looks, the greying hair and the frequently furrowed eyebrows making him read older.
“Forgive my impatience,” Dorian says, dropping his voice and stepping closer. His eyes glance briefly down the street and then back to Zachary. “You and I have a common destination and before I can go there I need that book. I cannot do this myself because they know me and if I set foot in that building I will never come out of it again. I am asking you for your help because I believe that you might be willing to help me. Please. I will beg you if I must.”
For the first time Dorian’s voice takes on the quality it had in the darkness back at the party, the storyteller cadence that turns the street corner into a sacred place.
Dorian holds his gaze, and for a moment the feeling in his chest Zachary had thought to be nervousness is something else entirely but then it turns back into nervousness. He feels too warm.
Zachary doesn’t know what to say so he nods and turns, leaving Dorian in the shadows, his heart pounding in his ears, his feet drawing him down a deserted street lined with brownstone buildings illuminated by pools of light from streetlamps and persistent strings of twinkling holiday lights looped through trees.
What are you doing? a voice in his head asks and he doesn’t have a good answer for it. Doesn’t know what or why or even where, exactly, because he forgot to check the street sign on the corner. He could keep walking, hail a cab, return to his hotel. But he wants his book back. And he wants to know what happens next.
A quest has been set in front of him and he is going to see it through.
Some buildings do not have visible numbers so Zachary cannot keep count but it doesn’t take long to reach the one he is looking for. It is a different sort of building than the ones that surround it, the facade a grey stone instead of brown, the windows covered with ornate black bars. He would have taken it for an embassy if it had a flag, or a college club. Something about it is too cold for it to seem like a private residence.
He glances back down the street before he climbs the steps but if Dorian is waiting there Zachary cannot see him. Zachary goes over his instructions in his head as he approaches the door, worried he is going to forget something.
The doorway is lit by a single bulb in an elaborate sconce that hangs over a metal plaque. Zachary leans in to read it.
Collector’s Club
No hours of operation, no other information at all. The glass above the door is frosted but the lights are on inside. The door is black with gold numbers: 213. Definitely the right one.
Zachary takes a deep breath and presses the doorbell.
In the depths there is a man lost in time.
He has opened the wrong doors. Chosen the wrong paths.
Wandered farther than he should have.
He is looking for someone. Something. Someone. He does not remember who the someone is, does not have the ability, here in the depths where time is fragile, to grasp the thoughts and memories and hold on to them, to sort through them to recall more than glimpses.
Sometimes he stops and in the stopping the memory grows clear enough for him to see her face, or pieces of it. But the clarity motivates him to continue and then the pieces fall apart again and he walks on not knowing for whom or what it is he walks.
He only knows he has not reached it yet.
Reached her yet.
Who? He looks toward the sky that is hidden from him by rock and earth and stories. No one answers his question. There is a d
ripping he mistakes for water, but no other sound. Then the question is forgotten again.
He walks down crumbling stairs and trips over tangled roots. He has long since passed by the last of the rooms with their doors and their locks, the places where the stories are content to remain on their shelves.
He has untangled himself from vines blossoming with story-filled flowers. He has traversed piles of abandoned teacups with text baked into their crackled glaze. He has walked through puddles of ink and left footprints that formed stories in his wake that he did not turn around to read.
Now he travels through tunnels with no light at their ends, feeling his way along unseen walls until he finds himself someplace somewhere sometime else.
He passes over broken bridges and under crumbling towers.