No hours of operation, no other information at all. The glass above the door is frosted but the lights are on inside. The door is black with gold numbers: 213. Definitely the right one.
Zachary takes a deep breath and presses the doorbell.
In the depths there is a man lost in time.
He has opened the wrong doors. Chosen the wrong paths.
Wandered farther than he should have.
He is looking for someone. Something. Someone. He does not remember who the someone is, does not have the ability, here in the depths where time is fragile, to grasp the thoughts and memories and hold on to them, to sort through them to recall more than glimpses.
Sometimes he stops and in the stopping the memory grows clear enough for him to see her face, or pieces of it. But the clarity motivates him to continue and then the pieces fall apart again and he walks on not knowing for whom or what it is he walks.
He only knows he has not reached it yet.
Reached her yet.
Who? He looks toward the sky that is hidden from him by rock and earth and stories. No one answers his question. There is a dripping he mistakes for water, but no other sound. Then the question is forgotten again.
He walks down crumbling stairs and trips over tangled roots. He has long since passed by the last of the rooms with their doors and their locks, the places where the stories are content to remain on their shelves.
He has untangled himself from vines blossoming with story-filled flowers. He has traversed piles of abandoned teacups with text baked into their crackled glaze. He has walked through puddles of ink and left footprints that formed stories in his wake that he did not turn around to read.
Now he travels through tunnels with no light at their ends, feeling his way along unseen walls until he finds himself someplace somewhere sometime else.
He passes over broken bridges and under crumbling towers.
He walks over bones he mistakes for dust and nothingness he mistakes for bones.
His once-fine shoes are worn. He abandoned his coat some time ago.
He does not remember the coat with its multitude of buttons. The coat, if coats could remember such things, would remember him but by the time they are reunited the coat will belong to someone else.
On clear days memories focus in his mind in scattered words and images. His name. The night sky. A room with red velvet drapery. A door. His father. Books, hundreds and thousands of books. A single book in her hand. Her eyes. Her hair. The tips of her fingers.
But most of the memories are stories. Pieces of them. Blind wanderers and star-crossed lovers, grand adventures and hidden treasures. Mad kings and cryptic witches.
The things he has seen and heard with his own eyes and ears mix with tales he has read or heard with his own eyes and ears. They are inseparable down here.
There are not many clear days. Clear nights.
There is no way to tell the difference here in the depths.
Night or day. Fact or fiction. Real or imagined.
Sometimes he feels he has lost his own story. Fallen out of its pages and landed here, in between, but he remains in his story. He cannot leave it no matter how he tries.
The man lost in time walks along the shore of the sea and does not look up to see the lack of stars. He wanders through empty cities of honey and bone, down streets that once rang with music and laughter. He lingers in abandoned temples, lighting candles for forgotten gods and running his fingers over the fossils of unaccepted offerings. He sleeps in beds that no one has dreamed upon in centuries and his own sleep is deep, his dreams as unfathomable as his waking hours.
At first the bees watched him. Followed him while he walked and hovered while he slept. They thought he might be someone else.
He is just a boy. A man. Something in between.
Now the bees ignore him. They go about their own business. They decided that one man out of his depth is no cause for alarm but even the bees are wrong from time to time.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS waits in the cold for so long that he rings the bell of the Collector’s Club a second time with a nearly frozen finger. He’s only sure he managed to ring it at all because he