The wood that composed it has rotted. Its hinges have rusted. Someone took its doorknob away.
The door remembers the time when it was complete. When there was a house with a roof and walls and other doors and people inside. There are leaves and birds and trees now but no people. Not for years and years.
So the girl comes as a surprise.
She is a small girl, too small to be wandering in the woods alone.
But she is not lost.
A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way.
This girl in the woods is not lost. She is exploring.
This girl is not scared. She is not unnerved by the darkness of the clawing shadows cast by the trees in the late-afternoon sun. She is not bothered by the thorns and branches that tug at her clothes and scratch at her skin.
She is young enough to carry fear with her without letting it into her heart. Without being scared. She wears her fear lightly, like a veil, aware that there are dangers but letting the crackling awareness hover around her. It does not sink in, it buzzes in excitement like a swarm of invisible bees.
The girl has been told many times not to wander too far into these woods. Warned not to play in them at all and she resents her explorations being dismissed as “play.”
Today she has gone so far into the woods that she wonders if she has started going out of them again toward the other side. She is not concerned about finding her way back. She remembers spaces, they stick in her mind even when they are expansive ones filled with trees and rocks. Once she closed her eyes and spun around to prove to herself that she could pick the right direction when she opened them again and she was only wrong by a little bit and a little bit wrong is mostly right.
Today she finds rocks that might once have been a wall, clustered in a line. Those that are piled on each other do not reach very high, even in the highest places it would be easy to climb over them, but the girl picks a medium-high spot to tackle instead.
On the other side of the wall there are clinging vines that snake over the ground, making it difficult to walk so the girl explores closer to the wall instead. It is a more interesting spot than others she has found in the woods. Were the girl older she might recognize that there was once a structure here but she is not old enough to put the pieces of crumbling rock together in her mind and assemble them into a long-forgotten building. The hinge of the door stays buried beneath years of leaves near her left shoe. A candlestick hides between rocks and the shadows fall in such a way that even this intrepid explorer does not discover it.
It is getting dark, though enough of the now golden sun remains to light her way home if she climbs back over the wall and retraces her steps, but she does not. She is distracted by something on the ground.
Away from the wall there is another line of stones, set in an almost-circle. A most-of-an-oval shape. A fallen archway that might once have contained a door.
The girl picks up a stick and uses it to dig around the leaves in the middle of the arch of stones. The leaves crumble and break and reveal something round and metal.
She pushes more of the leaves out of the way with the stick and uncovers a curling ring about the size of her hand, which might once have been brass but has tarnished in mossy patterns of green and brown.
One side is attached to another piece of metal that remains buried.
The girl has only ever seen pictures of door knockers but she thinks this might be one even though most of the ones she has seen have lions biting the metal rings and this ring does not, unless the lion is hiding in the dirt.
She has always wanted to use a door knocker to knock upon a door and this one is on the ground and not in a picture.
This one she can reach.
She wraps her fingers around it, not caring how dirty they become in the process, and lifts it up. It is heavy.
She lets the knocker drop again. The result is a satisfying clang of metal on metal that echoes through the trees.
The door is delighted to be knocked upon after so long.
And the door—though it is mere pieces of what it once was—remembers where it used to lead. It remembers how to open.
So now, when a small explorer knocks, the remains of this door to the Starless Sea let her in.
The earth crumbles beneath her, pulling her into the ground feetfirst in a cascade of dirt and rocks and leaves.
The girl is too surprised to scream.
She is not afraid. She does not understand what is happening so her fear only buzzes excitedly around her as she falls.
When she lands she is all curiosity and scraped elbows and dirt-covered eyelashes. The lion-less door knocker rests bent and broken by her side.