“The sea. The Starless Sea, the body of water on which this place is a Harbor.”
“Oh,” Mirabel says, frowning into her fizzing glass. Zachary waits for her to tell him that the Starless Sea is a bedtime story for children or that the Starless Sea is a state of mind or that there is no Starless Sea at all and there never was but she doesn’t. She stands and says, “This way.” She plucks the champagne bottle from the table and walks out of the wine cellar and into the ballroom.
Zachary follows, leaving his empty glass next to a deck of cards that would tell him the whole story if he laid them out in the proper order.
Mirabel leads him through the shadowed arches near the door to the wine cellar that are so dark Zachary had not noticed the stairs beyond them. He cannot see more than an arm’s length in front of him as they descend. He stays two stairs behind Mirabel in order not to step on the hem of her gown and even in that two-stair distance she practically vanishes into the shadows.
“How far down is it?” he starts to ask but the darkness takes the word How and volleys it back to him: How how how how how.
The darkness, he understands now, is very, very large.
The stairs terminate at a long low wall carved into the rock, short columns rising from the raw stone floor.
Zachary glances back up the stairs where six archways of light stare out into the dark.
“So you wish to see the sea,” Mirabel singsongs, looking out over the wall into the darkness, and Zachary cannot tell if she is talking to him or to herself or to the darkness that he assumes is a cave. The cave answers: See see sea sea sea.
“Where is it?” Zachary asks.
Mirabel steps closer to the stone wall and looks over. Zachary stands next to her and looks down.
The light from the ballroom catches an expanse of raw stone before the rock tapers off into nothingness and shadow. Zachary can just make out his silhouette on the stone alongside Mirabel’s but the light doesn’t reach anything resembling water or waves.
“How far down is it?”
In response to this question Mirabel takes the champagne bottle and tosses it into the darkness. Zachary waits for it to crash against the rock or splash into the sea he doesn’t believe is there but it does neither. He keeps waiting. And waiting.
Mirabel sips her wine.
After a time that would be more appropriately measured in minutes than seconds there is the softest sound far, far below, so far that Zachary cannot tell if the sound is breaking glass or not. The echo picks it up halfheartedly and carries it partway back as though the effort is too great to bring such a small sound so far.
“The Starless Sea,” Mirabel says, gesturing with her glass both at the abyss below and the darkness above, devoid of stars.
Zachary stares out into the nothingness, not knowing what to say.
“These used to be the beaches,” Mirabel tells him. “People would dance in the surf during the parties.”
“What happened?”
“It receded.”
“Is…is that why people left or did it recede because people left?”
“Neither. Both. You could try to point out a single moment that started the exodus but I think it was just time. The old doors were crumbling long before Allegra and company started tearing them down and displaying doorknobs like hunting trophies. Places change. People change.”
She takes another sip of her wine and Zachary wonders if she’s thinking of someone in particular but he doesn’t ask.
“It’s not what it was,” Mirabel continues. “Please don’t feel bad about missing the heyday, the heyday was over and the tide was out long before I was born.”
“But the book—” Zachary begins not knowing quite what he’s going to say and then Mirabel cuts him off.
“A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,” she places her hand on the wall in front of them. The stone is cracked near her fingers, a fissure running down the side and disappearing into a column. “You could write endless pages but the words will never be the place. Besides, that’s what it was. Not what it is.”
“It could be that again, couldn’t it?” Zachary asks. “If we fixed the doors, people would come.”
“I appreciate that we, Ezra,”
Mirabel says. “But I’ve been doing this for years. People come but they don’t stay. The only one who ever stayed is Rhyme.”