The Starless Sea Read online

  A golden, seemingly three-dimensional doorknob shimmers despite the lack of light. A keyhole is painted beneath, so dark it looks to be a void awaiting a key rather than a few strokes of black paint.

  The door is strange and pretty and something that the boy does not have words for and does not know if there are words for, even fancy French expressions.

  Somewhere in the street an unseen dog barks but it sounds distant and abstract. The sun moves behind a cloud and the alley feels longer and deeper and darker, the door itself brighter.

  Tentatively, the boy reaches out to touch the door.

  The part of him that still believes in magic expects it to be warm despite the chill in the air. Expects the image to have fundamentally changed the brick. Makes his heart beat faster even as his hand slows down because the part of him that thinks the other part is being childish prepares for disappointment.

  His fingertips meet the door below the sword and they come to rest on smooth paint covering cool brick, a slight unevenness to the surface betraying the texture below.

  It is just a wall. Just a wall with a pretty picture on it.

  But still.

  Still there is the sensation tugging at him that this is more than what it appears to be.

  He presses his palm against the painted brick. The false wood of the door is a brown barely a shade or two off from his own skin tone, as though it has been mixed to match him.

  Behind the door is somewhere else. Not the room behind the wall. Something more. He knows this. He feels it in his toes.

  This is what his mother would call a moment with meaning. A moment that changes the moments that follow.

  The son of the fortune-teller knows only that the door feels important in a way he cannot quite explain, even to himself.

  A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.

  He traces the painted lines of the key with his fingertips, marveling at how much the key, like the sword and the bee and the doorknob, looks as though it should be three-dimensional.

  The boy wonders who painted it and what it means, if it means anything. If not the door at least the symbols. If it is a sign and not a door, or if it is both at once.

  In this significant moment, if the boy turns the painted knob and opens the impossible door, everything will change.

  But he does not.

  Instead, he puts his hands in his pockets.

  Part of him decides he is being childish and that he is too old to expect real life to be like books. Another part of him decides that if he does not try he cannot be disappointed and he can go on believing that the door could open even if it is just pretend.

  He stands with his hands in his pockets and considers the door for a moment more before walking away.

  The following day his curiosity gets the better of him and he returns to find that the door has been painted over. The brick wall whitewashed to the point where he cannot even discern where, precisely, the door had been.

  And so the son of the fortune-teller does not find his way to the Starless Sea.

  Not yet.

  January 2015

  There is a book on a shelf in a university library.

  This is not unusual, but it is not where this particular book should be.

  The book is mis-shelved in the fiction section, even though the majority of it is true and the rest is true enough. The fiction section of this library is not as well traversed as other areas, its rows dimly lit and often dusty.

  The book was donated, part of a collection left to the university per the previous owner’s last will and testament. These books were added to the library, classified by the Dewey Decimal System, given stickers with barcodes inside their covers so they could be scanned at the checkout desk and sent off in different directions.

  This particular book was scanned only once to be added to the catalogue. It does not have an author named within its pages, so it was entered in the system as “Unknown” and started off amongst the U-initialed authors but has meandered through the alphabet as other books move around it. Sometimes it is taken down and considered and replaced again. Its binding has been cracked a handful of times, and once a professor even perused the first few pages and intended to come back to it but forgot about it instead.

  No one has read this book in its entirety, not since it has been in this library.

  Some (the forgetful professor included) have thought, fleetingly, that this book does not belong here. That perhaps it should be in the special collection, a room that requires students to have written permission to visit and where librarians hover while they look at rare books and no one is allowed to check anything out. There are no barcodes on those books. Many require gloves for handling.

  But this book remains in the regular collection. In immobile, hypothetical circulation.

  The book’s cover is a deep burgundy cloth that has aged and faded from rich to dull. There were once gilded letters impressed upon it but the gold is gone now and the letters have worn away to glyph-like dents. The top corner is permanently bent from where a heavier volume sat atop it in a box during a stretch in a storage facility from 1984 to 1993.

  Today is a January day during what the students refer to as J-term, when classes have not yet started but they are already welcomed back on campus, and there are lectures and student-led symposiums and theatrical productions in rehearsal. A post-holiday warm-up before the regular routines begin again.

  Zachary Ezra Rawlins is on campus to read. He feels mildly guilty about this fact, as he should be spending his precious winter hours playing (and replaying, and analyzing) video games in preparation for his thesis. But he spends so much time in front of screens he has a near-compulsive need to let his eyeballs rest on paper. He reminds himself that there is plenty of subject overlap, though he has found subject overlap between video games and just about anything.

  Reading a novel, he supposes, is like playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game. (Though he sometimes wishes choose-your-own-adventure novels would come back into fashion.)

  He has been reading (or rereading) a great many children’s books as well, because the stories seem more story-like, though he is mildly concerned this might be a symptom of an impending quarter-life crisis. (He half expects this quarter-life crisis to show up like clockwork on his twenty-fifth birthday, which is only two months away.)

  The librarians took him to be a literature major until one of them struck up a conversation and he felt obliged to confess he was actually one of those Emerging Media Studies people. He missed the secret identity as soon as it was gone, a guise he hadn’t even realized he enjoyed wearing. He supposes he looks like a lit major, with his square-framed glasses and cable-knit sweaters. Zachary still has not entirely adjusted to New England winters, especially not one like this with its never-ceasing snow. He shields his southern-raised body with heavy layers of wool, wrapped in scarves and warmed with thermoses full of hot cocoa that he sometimes spikes with bourbon.

  There are two weeks left in January and Zachary has exhausted most of his to-read list of childhood classics, at least the ones in this library’s collection, so he has moved on to books he has been meaning to read and others chosen at random after testing the first few pages.

  It has become his morning ritual, making his choices in the book-dampened library quiet of the stacks and then returning to his dorm to read the day away. In the skylighted atrium, he shakes the snow from his boots on the rug by the entrance and drops The Catcher in the Rye and The Shadow of the Wind into the returns box, wondering if halfway through the second year of a master’s degree program is too late to be unsure about one’s major. Then he reminds himself that he likes Emerging Media and if he’d spent five and a half years studying literature
he would probably be growing weary of it by now, too. A reading major, that’s what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.

  The fiction section, two floors below and down a hallway lined with framed lithographs of the campus in its youth, is, unsurprisingly, empty. Zachary’s footsteps echo as he walks through the stacks. This section of the building is older, a contrast to the bright atrium at the entrance, the ceilings lower and the books stacked all the way up, the light falling in dim confined rectangles from bulbs that have a tendency to burn out no matter how often they are changed. If he ever has the money after graduating Zachary thinks he might make a very specific donation to fix the electrical wiring in this part of the library. Light enough to read by brought to you by Z. Rawlins, Class of 2015. You’re welcome.

  He seeks out the W section, having recently become enamored of Sarah Waters, and though the catalogue listed several titles, The Little Stranger is the only one on the shelf so he is saved decision-making. Zachary then searches for what he thinks of as mystery books, titles he does not recognize or authors he has never heard of. He starts by looking for books with blank spines.

  Reaching to a higher shelf that a shorter student might have needed a stepladder to access, he pulls down a cloth-covered, wine-colored volume. Both spine and cover are blank, so Zachary opens the book to the title page.

  Sweet Sorrows

  He turns the page to see if there is another that lists the author but it moves directly into the text. He flips to the back and there are no acknowledgments or author’s notes, just a barcode sticker attached to the inside of the back cover. He returns to the beginning and finds no copyright, no dates, no information about printing numbers.

  It is clearly quite old and Zachary does not know much about the history of publishing or bookbinding, if such information is possibly not included in books of a certain age. He finds the lack of author perplexing. Perhaps a page has gone missing, or it was misprinted. He flips through the text and notices that there are pages missing, vacancies and torn edges scattered throughout though none where the front matter should be.

  Zachary reads the first page, and then another and another.

  Then the lightbulb above his head that has been illuminating the U–Z section blinks and darkens.

  Zachary reluctantly closes the book and places it on top of The Little Stranger. He tucks both books securely under his arm and returns to the light of the atrium.

  The student librarian at the front desk, her hair up in a bun skewered by a ballpoint pen, encounters some difficulty with the mysterious volume. It scans improperly first, and then as some other book entirely.

  “I think it has the wrong barcode,” she says. She taps at her keyboard, squinting at the monitor. “Do you recognize this one?” she asks, handing the book to the other librarian at the desk, a middle-aged man in a covetable green sweater. He flips through the front pages, frowning.

  “No author, that’s a new one. Where was it shelved?”

  “In fiction, somewhere in the Ws,” Zachary answers.

  “Check under Anonymous, maybe,” the green-sweatered librarian suggests, handing back the book and turning his attention to another patron.

  The other librarian taps the keyboard again and shakes her head. “Still can’t find it,” she tells Zachary. “So weird.”

  “If it’s a problem…” Zachary starts, though he trails off, hoping that she’ll just let him take it. He feels oddly possessive about the book already.

  “Not a problem, I’ll mark it down in your file,” she says. She types something into the computer and scans the barcode again. She pushes the authorless book and The Little Stranger across the desk toward him along with his student ID. “Happy reading!” she says cheerfully before turning back to the book she had been reading when Zachary approached the desk. Something by Raymond Chandler, but he cannot see the title. The librarians always seem more enthusiastic during J-term, when they can spend more time with books and less with frazzled students and irate faculty.

  During the frigid walk back to his dorm Zachary is preoccupied by both the book itself, itching to continue reading, and wondering why it was not in the library system. He has encountered minor problems with such things before, having checked out a great number of books. Sometimes the scanner will not be able to read a barcode but then the librarian can type the number in manually. He wonders how they managed in the time before the scanner, with cards in catalogues and little pockets with signatures in the backs of books. It would be nice to sign his name rather than being a number in a system.

  Zachary’s dorm is a brick building tucked amongst the crumbling cluster of graduate residences and covered in dead, snow-dusted ivy. He climbs the many stairs to his fourth-floor room, tucked into the eaves of the building, with slanted walls and drafty windows. He has covered most of it with blankets and has a contraband space heater for the winter. Tapestries sent from his mother drape the walls and make the room admittedly cozier, partially because he cannot seem to get the sage smell out no matter how many times he washes them. The MFA candidate next door calls it a cave, though it is more like a den, if dens had Magritte posters and four different gaming systems. His flat-screen TV stares out from the wall, black and mirrorlike. He should throw a tapestry over it.

  Zachary puts his books on his desk and his boots and coat in the closet before heading down the hall to the kitchenette to make a cup of cocoa. Waiting for the electric kettle to boil he wishes he had brought the wine-colored book with him, but he is trying to make a point of not having his nose constantly in a book. It is an attempt to appear friendlier that he’s not certain is working yet.

  Back in his den with the cocoa he settles into the beanbag chair bequeathed to him by a departing student the year before. It is a garish neon green in its natural state, but Zachary draped it with a tapestry that was too heavy to hang on the wall, camouflaging it in shades of brown and grey and violet. He aims the space heater at his legs and opens Sweet Sorrows back to the page the unreliable library lightbulb had stranded him on and begins to read.

  After a few pages the story shifts, and Zachary cannot tell if it is a novel or a short-story collection or perhaps a story within a story. He wonders if it will return and loop back to the previous part. Then it changes again.

  Zachary Ezra Rawlins’s hands begin to shake.

  Because while the first part of the book is a somewhat romantic bit about a pirate, and the second involves a ceremony with an acolyte in a strange underground library, the third part is something else entirely.

  The third part is about him.

  The boy is the son of the fortune-teller.

  A coincidence, he thinks, but as he continues reading the details are too perfect to be fiction. Sage may permeate the shoelaces of many sons of fortune-tellers but he doubts that they also took shortcuts through alleyways on their routes home from school.

  When he reaches the part about the door he puts the book down.

  He feels light-headed. He stands up, worried he might pass out and thinking he might open the window and instead he kicks over his forgotten mug of cocoa.

  Automatically, Zachary walks down the hall to the kitchenette to get paper towels. He mops up the cocoa and goes back to the kitchenette to throw away the sopping towels. He rinses his mug in the sink. The mug has a chip he is not certain was there before. Laughter echoes up the stairwell, far away and hollow.

  Zachary returns to his room and confronts the book again, staring at it as it rests nonchalantly on the beanbag chair.

  He locks his door, something he rarely does.

  He picks up the book and inspects it more thoroughly than he had before. The top corner of the cover is dented, the cloth starting to fray. Tiny flecks of gold dot the spine.

  Zachary takes a deep breath and opens the book again. He turns to the page where he left off and
forces himself to read the words as they unfold precisely the way he expects them to.

  His memory fills in the details left off the page: the way the whitewash reached halfway up the wall and then the bricks turned red again, the dumpsters at the other end of the alley, the weight of his schoolbook-stuffed backpack on his shoulder.

  He has remembered that day a thousand times but this time it is different. This time his memory is guided along by the words on the page and it is clear and vibrant. As though the moment only just happened and is not more than a decade in the past.

  He can picture the door perfectly. The precision of the paint. The trompe l’oeil effect he couldn’t name at the time. The bee with its delicate gold stripes. The sword pointed upright toward the key.

  But as Zachary continues reading there is more than what his memory contains.

  He had thought there could be no stranger feeling than stumbling across a book that narrates a long-ago incident from his own life that was never relayed to anyone, never spoken about or written down but nevertheless is unfolding in typeset prose, but he was wrong.

  It is stranger still to have that narration confirm long-held suspicions that in that moment, in that alleyway facing that door he was given something extraordinary and he let the opportunity slip from his fingers.

  A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.

  Zachary reaches the end of the page and turns it, expecting his story to continue but it does not. The narrative shifts entirely again, to something about a dollhouse. He flips through the rest of the book, scanning the pages for mentions of the son of the fortune-teller or painted doors but finds nothing.

  He goes back and rereads the pages about the boy. About him. About the place he did not find behind the door, whatever a Starless Sea is supposed to be. His hands have stopped shaking but he is light-headed and hot, he remembers now that he never opened the window but he cannot stop reading. He pushes his eyeglasses farther up the bridge of his nose so he can focus better.