The Starless Sea
“I don’t think this is Narnia,” Dorian says.
Zachary lets his eyes adjust to the light. Dorian is correct, it is not Narnia. It is a room filled with doors.
Each door is carved with images. Zachary walks toward the closest one, losing his grip on Dorian’s hand in the process and regretting it but too curious.
On the door there is a girl holding a lantern aloft against a dark sky teeming with winged creatures, screaming and clawing and hissing at her.
“Let’s not open that one,” Zachary says.
“Agreed,” Dorian says, looking over his shoulder.
They move from door to door. Here is a carved city spiked with curving towers. There an island under a moonlit sky.
One door depicts a figure behind bars reaching out to another in a separate cage and it reminds Zachary of the pirate in the basement. He goes to open it but Dorian pulls his attention to another.
This door holds a carved celebration. Dozens of faceless figures dancing under banners and lanterns. One banner has a string of moons engraved upon it, a full moon surrounded by waxing and waning crescents.
Dorian opens the door. The space beyond is dark. He steps inside.
Zachary follows but as soon as he enters Dorian is gone.
“Dorian?” Zachary says, turning back to the room with its multitude of doors but that too has vanished.
He turns again and he is standing in a well-lit hallway lined with books.
A pair of women in long gowns brush by, clearly more interested in each other than him, laughing as they pass.
“Hello?” Zachary calls after them but they do not turn.
He looks behind him. There is no door, only books. Tall shelves messily stacked and piled, a well-used collection, some sitting open. A few shelves down there is a handsome young man with ginger hair so bright it borders on a proper red browsing through one of the volumes.
“Excuse me,” Zachary says but the man does not look up from his book. Zachary puts a hand out to touch him on the shoulder and the fabric feels strange beneath his fingers, there but not there. The idea of touching a man’s shoulder in a suit jacket and not the actual feeling. The touch version of a movie that has not been dubbed properly. Zachary pulls his hand back in surprise.
The ginger-haired man looks up, not quite at him.
“Are you here for the party?” he asks.
“What party?” Zachary responds but before the man can answer they are interrupted.
“Winston!” a male voice calls from around the next bend in the hallway, in the direction that the girls in gowns had been heading. The ginger-haired man puts down his book and gives Zachary a little bow before going to follow the voice.
“I think I saw a ghost,” Zachary hears him remark casually to his companion before they disappear down the hall.
Zachary looks at his hands. They look the same as usual. He picks up the book the man had replaced on the shelf and it feels solid but not quite solid in his hands, like his brain is telling him he’s holding a book without there actually being a book there.
But there is a book there. He opens it and to his surprise he recognizes the fragments of poetry on the page. Sappho.
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
Zachary closes the book and puts it back on the shelf, the weight of it not quite transferring at the same time as the action but he finds himself anticipating the tactile discrepancies already.
Laughter bubbles from another hall. Music plays in the distance. Zachary is undoubtedly within his familiar Harbor on the Starless Sea but everything is vibrant and alive. There are so many people.
He walks by something he thinks is a golden statue of a naked woman until she moves and he realizes the gold is meticulously painted onto an actual naked woman. She reaches out and touches his arm as he passes, leaving streaks of golden powder on his sleeve.