“A very long time. Please don’t ask me to attempt to calculate it. I no longer keep any clocks.”
Dorian looks down at the box. It is heavy and solid in his hands.
“You said your wife gave this to you to give to me,” Dorian says and the innkeeper nods. Dorian runs his fingers over a sequence of golden moons along the edge of the box. Full and then waning and then vanished and then returned, waxing and then full again. He wonders if there is any difference between story and reality down here. “Is your wife the moon?”
“The moon is a rock in the sky,” the innkeeper says, chuckling. “My wife is my wife. I’m sorry she’s not here right now, she would have liked to meet you.”
“I would have liked that, too,” Dorian says. He looks back at the box in his hands.
There does not seem to be a lid. The gold motifs repeat and encircle every side and he cannot find a hinge or a seam. The moon waxes and wanes along its edges, over and over again. Dorian trails his chilled fingertips over each one, wondering how long it will be before the moon is new and dark and the innkeeper’s wife is here again and then he pauses.
One of the full moons on what he assumes is the top of the box has an indentation, a six-sided impression concealed in its roundness, something he can feel more than see.
It is not a keyhole, but something could fit there.
He wishes Zachary were here with him, because Zachary might be better at such puzzles and for a multitude of other reasons.
What’s missing? he thinks, looking over the box. There are owls and cats hidden in the negative space between the gold designs. There are stars and shapes that could be doors. Dorian thinks over all of his stories. What isn’t here that should be?
It strikes him, sudden and simple.
“Do you have a mouse?” he asks the innkeeper.
The innkeeper looks at him quizzically for a moment and then he laughs.
“Can you come with me?” he asks.
Dorian, substantially warmer than he was when he arrived, nods and gets to his feet, placing the box on a table next to the chair.
The innkeeper leads him across the hall.
“This inn was once somewhere else,” the innkeeper explains. “Little has changed within its walls but I once mentioned to my wife that I sometimes miss the mice. They used to chew through sacks of flour and secret seeds away in my teacups, it was infuriating but I was accustomed to it and I found I missed them once they were gone. So she brings them to me.”
He stops at a cabinet tucked in between a pair of bookshelves and opens its door.
The shelves inside are covered with silver mice, some dancing and others sleeping or nibbling on minuscule pieces of golden cheese. One wields a small golden sword. A tiny knight.
Dorian reaches into the cabinet and picks up the mouse with the sword. It stands on a six-sided base.
“May I?” he asks the innkeeper.
“Of course,” the innkeeper replies.
Dorian brings the mouse knight back to the chair by the fireplace and places it into the indentation in the moon on the box. It fits perfectly.
He turns the mouse and the hidden lid clicks loose.
“Ha!” the innkeeper exclaims delightedly.
Dorian places the silver mouse with its sword down next to the box.
He lifts the lid.
Inside is a beating human heart.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS, when he was very young, would play with crystals from his mother’s expansive collection: staring into them, holding them up to lights and gazing at inclusions and cracks and wounds fractured and healed by time, imagining worlds within the stones, entire kingdoms and universes held in his palms.
The spaces he envisioned then are nothing compared to the crystalline caverns he walks through now, with a torch held aloft to light his way and an owl perched on his shoulder, digging its talons into his sweater.