The Starless Sea

Zachary thinks through bees and keys and doors and books and elevators, reviewing the path that brought him to this room and this chair. The more he traces moments back the more he thinks maybe it was all too late even before it started.

“You tried to save him,” Zachary says to the Keeper. “When Allegra was going to shoot Dorian you stopped her.”

“I did not wish you to suffer as I suffer, Mister Rawlins. I thought I might prevent the moment we have found ourselves in now. I am sorry I was not successful. I have felt what you are feeling myriad times. It does not get any easier. It simply becomes familiar.”

“You’ve lost her before,” Zachary says. He is beginning to understand even if he is not yet certain that he believes.

“Many, many times,” the Keeper confirms. “I lose her, through circumstance or Death or my own stupidity and years pass and she returns again. This time she was convinced something had changed, she never told me why.”

“But…” Zachary starts and then stops, distracted by the memory of Dorian’s voice in his ear.

(Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again and Time is always waiting.)

“The person you knew as Mirabel,” the Keeper continues, “no, I’m sorry, you called her Max, didn’t you? She has lived in different vessels over the centuries. Sometimes she remembers and others…The incarnation before this one was named Sivía. She was soaking wet when she came out of the elevator, you reminded me of her when you first arrived dripping with paint. It must have been raining near Reykjavík that night, I never asked. I didn’t recognize her at first. I rarely do and I wonder after how I could be so blind, every time. And it always ends in loss. Sivía believed that could change as well.”

He pauses, staring into his glass. Zachary waits a moment before asking, “What happened to her?”

“She died,” the Keeper answers. “There was a fire. It was the first such incident in this space and there she was, right in the center of it. I gathered what I could to bring to the crypt but it was difficult to separate what was once a woman from pieces of former books and cats. Afterward I thought perhaps she had been the last. After the fire everything did change. Slowly at first, but then the doors closed one after another until I was certain she could not return even if she wished to, and then one day I looked up and she was already here.”

“How long have you been here?” Zachary asks, staring at the man in front of him, thinking about metaphorical pirates in basement cages and Time and Fate and burned places, remembering how the Keeper looked from across the gilded ballroom. He looks exactly the same now. There are more pearls in his hair.

“I have always been here,” the Keeper answers. He puts his glass down on the desk. He picks up the die and holds it in his palm. “I was here before there was a here to be in.” He rolls the die on the desk and does not watch it fall. “Come, I would like to show you something.”

The Keeper stands and walks toward the back of the office, to a door Zachary hadn’t noticed, tucked between two tall bookshelves.

Zachary looks down at the desk.

Faceup on the die is a single key but Zachary doesn’t know what it is meant to lock or unlock. He gets to his feet, finding his legs more steady than he expects. He glances out at the Heart where the floor is still slowly reassembling its broken pieces. He follows the Keeper, pausing at a bookshelf that contains a familiar-looking jar with a hand floating inside, waving hello or goodbye or some other sentiment in his direction. He recalls the heavy object in Mirabel’s bag after they escaped the Collector’s Club and wonders briefly who the hand belonged to before it was jarred and then he moves into the room beyond the office.

The Keeper lights a lamp, illuminating a chamber smaller than Zachary’s, or maybe so filled with books and art that it seems smaller. The bed in the corner is also covered in books. Books are stacked two rows deep on shelves and piled on all available surfaces and most of the floor. Zachary looks around for the ginger cat but does not find it.

He pauses at a shelf occupied by notebooks identical to the one on the desk. They have names along their spines. Lin, Grace, Asha, Étienne. Many names have more than one notebook. Several Sivías are followed by rows of echoing Mirabels.

Zachary turns to the Keeper who is lighting the other lamps to ask about them but the question dies on his lips.

Beyond the Keeper there is a large painting on the wall.

Zachary’s first thought is that it’s a mirror, because he is in it, but as he moves closer the Zachary in the painting remains motionless, though he is rendered with such r

ealistic detail it looks like he should be breathing.

It is a life-size portrait. The painting Zachary stands toe-to-toe with the actual one, in the same suede shoes, the same blue pajama pants that somehow manage to look elegant and classical in oil paint. But the painting Zachary is shirtless, holding a sword in one hand, hanging lightly by his side, and a feather in the other, held aloft.

Dorian stands behind him. Leaning in toward painting Zachary and whispering in his ear. One of Dorian’s arms is wrapped around him, palm tilted upward and covered in honeybees that dance on his fingertips and swarm up his wrist. Dorian’s other hand, held out to the side, is draped in chains with dozens of keys dangling from them.

Above their heads floats a golden crown. Beyond it is a vast night sky filled with stars.

It is all achingly realistic, except for the fact that this Zachary’s chest is cracked open, his heart exposed, the star-filled sky visible behind it. Or maybe it’s Dorian’s heart. Maybe it’s both. Either way it is anatomically correct down to its arteries and aorta but painted in metallic gold and covered in flames, glowing like a lantern, casting perfectly painted flecks of light over the bees and the keys and the sword and both of their faces.

“What is this?” Zachary asks the Keeper.

“This is the last piece Allegra painted here,” the Keeper answers.

“Allegra’s the painter.” Zachary remembers the basement room filled with paintings of the Harbor in the Collector’s Club. “When did she paint this?”

“Twenty years ago.”

“How is that possible?”