The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

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.)

“A game or a book that has meaning to me might be boring to you, or vice versa. Stories are personal, you relate or you don’t.”

“So far so good, but I don’t like to commit to an opinion until the end of a book because you never know what might happen.

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.

These doors will sing. Silent siren songs for those who seek what lies behind them.

For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to.

Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. ...

Others when faced with a door will leave it undisturbed, even if their curiosity is piqued. They think they need permission. They believe the door awaits someone else, even if it is in fact waiting for them.

Devotion is for acolytes. Worthiness for guardians. Keepers must have spirit and keep it aloft.

This is a significant moment, he thinks, hearing the words in his head in his mother’s voice. A moment with meaning. A moment that changes the moments that follow.

For some reason laundry concerns drag him back to the reality of the situation, dreams or hallucinations probably don’t involve such mundane problems.

“No, each one’s different. They have similar elements, though. All stories do, no matter what form they take. Something was, and then something changed. Change is what a story is, after all.”

It’s disconcerting and making him dizzy and maybe once you go to wonderland you’re supposed to stay there because nothing will ever be the same in the real world, in the other world, afterward.

“Where I am from they tell a story about it,” the woman said, her attention on the work in front of her, the steady movement of her hands through the flour. “They say that every hundred years—some versions say every five hundred, or every thousand—the sun disappears from the daytime sky at the same time the moon vanishes from the night. They say their absence is coordinated so that they may meet in a secret location, unseen by the stars, to discuss the state of the world and compare what each has seen over the past hundred or five hundred or thousand years. They meet and talk and part again, returning to their respective places in the sky until their next meeting.”

For no mortal can love the moon. Not for long.

Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.

“Climbing is not for girls.” “Anything is for girls.” Her expression is so serious it makes him consider the statement. It runs counter to everything his uncle says about girls but he thinks perhaps his uncle does not know as much about girls as he lets on, and his aunt has very particular ideas about what constitutes ladylike.

“I wanted to read it,” Simon explains, though it seems obvious. What else would he want to do with a book? Though it is not quite true. He wants to do more than read it. He wants to study it. He wants to savor it. He wants to use it as a window to see inside another person. He wants to take the book into his home, into his life, into his bed because he cannot do the same with the girl who gave it to him.

Simon puts the book down. He does not wait for her to say anything. He cannot wait, he is too afraid that she will vanish again and never reappear. He closes the distance between them as quickly as he can and then he kisses her desperately, hungrily, and after a moment she kisses him back in equal measure. Kissing, Eleanor thinks, is not done any justice in books. They peel off each other’s clothes in layers. He curses at the strange clasps and fasteners on her garments while she laughs at the sheer number of buttons on his. He leaves her bunny ears on. It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. In one person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric. But doors cannot stay closed forever.

Dorian smiles and Zachary wonders how you can miss someone’s smile when you’ve only

seen it once before.

There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. I would like to look at you seems like such an awkward request.

“Am I familiar?” Dorian says and Zachary wants to say Yes, yes you are the most familiar and I don’t understand how but that is too much truth right now so instead he says, “If you were a man lost in time where would you be?”

He thinks I feel like I have known you forever but he doesn’t say it and so they only hold each other’s gaze, not needing to say anything.

“I think people came here for the same reason we came here,” Dorian says. “In search of something. Even if we didn’t know what it was. Something more. Something to wonder at. Someplace to belong. We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own.

“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately. Which was your favorite?”

The door opens onto a beach, a stretch of moonlit sand. The door is wooden, and if it was painted once the sand and the wind have conspired to wear the wood bare. It is hidden in a cliffside, obscured by rock. It has been mistaken for driftwood by everyone who has glimpsed it for years, ever since the last time the painter was here, before she was ever called the painter, when she was just Allegra, a then young woman who found a door and went through it and didn’t come back. Until now.

If she can prevent anyone from entering she can prevent the things that she has seen from happening. The object within the jar in her bag (an object she saw and painted before she understood what it was and long before it became an object within a jar) will be insurance. Without doors she can prevent the return of the book and everything that would follow.

“Historically the dice have been rolled to see what kismet has to say about a new arrival to this place,” the Keeper says. “For a time the results were used to gauge potential for paths. Hearts were for poets, those who wore their hearts open and aflame. Long before that they were used by storytellers and rolled to nudge a story toward romance or tragedy or mystery. Their purpose has changed over time but there were bees before there were acolytes and swords before there were guardians and all of those symbols were here before they were ever carved upon dice.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

This is stranger than reading about himself in Sweet Sorrows. Maybe because he can only assume that he is the boy in the book when he is absolutely, unquestionably the man in the painting.

The light below grows closer. He is falling through a cavern. Its floor is glowing. Dorian’s thoughts become flashes. Images and sensations. Crowded sidewalks and yellow taxis. Books that felt truer than people. Hotel rooms and airports and the Rose Room at the New York Public Library. Standing in the snow looking at his future through the window of a bar. An owl wearing a crown. A gilded ballroom. An almost kiss.

“Stop, please,” she says. A warning and a wish. “I love you but I will not sit here and wait for this story to change. I am going to make it change.” She holds his gaze over the length of the sword and after a long wordless conversation she lowers the sword and hands it to Zachary. “Take this.”

“You’re the pirate,” Zachary says. All of the stories are the same story. “In the basement. From the book.” The Keeper turns to look at him. “Mirabel’s the girl who rescued you.”

“That was a very long time ago,” the Keeper says. “In an older Harbor. And pirate is not a proper translation. Rogue might be closer. They used to call me the Harbormaster until they decided Harbors should not have masters.”

“What happened?” Zachary asks. He has been wondering ever since he read Sweet Sorrows for the first time. This is not where their story ends. Clearly. “We did not make it far. They executed her in my place. Th...

“Allegra got desperate enough to try to close the door from the other side,” she explains. “Do you like this place, Ezra?” “Yes,” Zachary answers, confused, but even as he says the word he realizes he does not mean this place now the way it is with its empty halls and broken universe. He means the place it was before, when it was alive. He means a crowded ballroom. A multitude of seekers looking for things they do not have names for and finding them in stories written and unwritten and in each other.

It’s never too late to change what you are, it took me a long time to figure that out.”

“Who said anything about fate?” Mirabel says but she smiles as she says it, the glamorous old-movie-star smile that looks frightening in the firelight. “Aren’t you…” Zachary pauses because Aren’t you Fate? sounds like too absurd a question to ask even when casually discussing past lives and despite the fact that he already almost believes that the woman in front of him is somehow, crazily, Fate. He stares at her. She looks like a regular person. Or maybe she’s like her painted doors: an imitation so precise as to fool the eye. The shifting firelight falls on different pieces of her, allowing the rest to disappear into shadow. She looks at him with dark, unblinking eyes and smudged mascara and he doesn’t know what to think anymore. Or what to ask.

“What are you?” Zachary settles on and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Mirabel’s smile vanishes. She takes a step toward him, standing too close. Something changes in her face, as though she were wearing an invisible mask that has been removed, a personality conjured from pink hair and snark as false as a tail and a crown from a faraway party. Zachary tries to remember if he has ever felt the same nameless ancient presence from her that he felt with the Keeper and somehow he knows it was always there and that the vanished smile is older than the oldest of movie stars. She leans in close enough to kiss him and her voice is low and calm when she speaks. “I’m a lot of things, Ezra. But I am not the reason you didn’t open that door.”

“What?” Zachary asks even though he is certain he already knows what she means. “It is your own damned fault that you didn’t open that door when you were however old, no one else’s,” Mirabel tells him. “Not mine and not whoever painted over it, either. Yours. You decided not to open it. So don’t stand there and invent mythology that allows you to blame me for your problems. I have my own.” “We’re not he...

“You’re here because I need you to do something that I can’t,” Mirabel corrects him. She shoves the sword at him, hilt upward, forcing him to take it. It’s even heavier than he remembers. “And you’re here because you followed me, you didn’t have to.” “I didn’t have to?” “No, you didn’t,” Mirabel says. “You want to think that you did or that you were supposed to but you always had a choice. You don’t like choosing, do you? You don’t do anything until someone or something else says that you can. You didn’t even decide ...

“You willed this ship into existence?” “I found parts of it and told myself the story of the rest of it and eventually they were the same, the found parts and the story parts. It can steer itself but I have to tell it where to go and nudge it back in the right direction sometimes. I can change the sails but they like being this color. Do you like them?”

“For a while I was looking for a person but I didn’t find them and after that I was looking for myself. Now that I’ve found me I’m back to exploring, which is what I was doing in the first place before I was doing anything else and I think I was supposed to be exploring all along. Does that sound silly?”

There are no meanings. Not anymore.