sips her wine.
After a time that would be more appropriately measured in minutes than seconds there is the softest sound far, far below, so far that Zachary cannot tell if the sound is breaking glass or not. The echo picks it up halfheartedly and carries it partway back as though the effort is too great to bring such a small sound so far.
“The Starless Sea,” Mirabel says, gesturing with her glass both at the abyss below and the darkness above, devoid of stars.
Zachary stares out into the nothingness, not knowing what to say.
“These used to be the beaches,” Mirabel tells him. “People would dance in the surf during the parties.”
“What happened?”
“It receded.”
“Is…is that why people left or did it recede because people left?”
“Neither. Both. You could try to point out a single moment that started the exodus but I think it was just time. The old doors were crumbling long before Allegra and company started tearing them down and displaying doorknobs like hunting trophies. Places change. People change.”
She takes another sip of her wine and Zachary wonders if she’s thinking of someone in particular but he doesn’t ask.
“It’s not what it was,” Mirabel continues. “Please don’t feel bad about missing the heyday, the heyday was over and the tide was out long before I was born.”
“But the book—” Zachary begins not knowing quite what he’s going to say and then Mirabel cuts him off.
“A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,” she places her hand on the wall in front of them. The stone is cracked near her fingers, a fissure running down the side and disappearing into a column. “You could write endless pages but the words will never be the place. Besides, that’s what it was. Not what it is.”
“It could be that again, couldn’t it?” Zachary asks. “If we fixed the doors, people would come.”
“I appreciate that we, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “But I’ve been doing this for years. People come but they don’t stay. The only one who ever stayed is Rhyme.”
“The Keeper said all of the old residents left or died.”
“Or disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Zachary repeats and the cavern around them echoes his echo, breaking the word into fragments and picking its favorite: Appear, appear, appear.
“Do me a favor, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “Don’t wander too far down.”
She turns and kisses him on the cheek and walks up the stairs.
Zachary takes one last look into the darkness and then follows her.
He knows their conversation is over before he reaches the top, but she gives him a little parting tip of her empty glass when he walks past and continues across the expansive ballroom.
He can feel her watching as he goes and he doesn’t turn around. He does a little pirouette in the middle of the empty dance floor and he hears her laugh as he continues on.
Everything feels okay, suddenly, even in the ballroom emptiness and the crackling of one fire that should be a dozen.
Maybe everything is burning, has burned, will burn.
Maybe he shouldn’t drink things down here, as a general rule.
Maybe, he thinks as he ascends the stairs at the far end of the ballroom, there are more mysteries and more puzzles down here than he can ever hope to solve.
As Zachary reaches the top of the stairs a shadow passes by the end of the hall and he can tell by the hair that it’s Rhyme. He tries to catch up but she manages to stay ahead of him.
He watches as she dims some lamps and ignores others.
Curious both in general and about where Rhyme goes when she’s not floating through the halls lighting candles, Zachary continues to follow her from a good distance.
He follows her down a hall filled with delicate carvings and large statues as she lights candles held out toward her by marble hands.
Rhyme stops abruptly and Zachary steps back into a shadowed alcove, tucked behind a life-size statue of a satyr and a nymph frozen in an impressively acrobatic embrace. He can see Rhyme through a window of thigh and arm. She’s stopped in front of a carved stone wall. She reaches up and presses something against it and the wall slides open.
Rhyme steps inside and the wall slides back into place behind her, like the wall behind