After the second chime he hears someone moving behind the door. The click of multiple locks being undone.
The door opens a few inches, a metal chain keeping it latched but from the opening a short young woman looks up at him. She is younger than Zachary but not so much so that she would be considered a girl and reminds him of someone or maybe she has one of those faces. The look she gives him is a mix of wariness and boredom. Apparently even strange covert organizations have interns that get stuck with the lousy shifts.
“May I help you?” she asks.
“I, uh, I’m dropping this off for the archive,” Zachary says. He pulls The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology partway out of his coat pocket. The woman peers at it but does not ask to see it. She asks for something else.
“Your name?”
This is a question Zachary has not anticipated.
“Does it matter?” he asks, in the best impression of Dorian he can manage. He shifts his coat in what he hopes is a nonchalant way, making sure the silver sword is visible.
The woman frowns.
“You may leave the item with me,” she says. “I will see that it is—”
“Alex sent me,” Zachary interrupts.
The woman’s expression shifts. The boredom seeps out of it and the wariness takes over.
“Just a minute,” she says. The door closes entirely and Zachary starts to panic but then realizes that she is unlatching the chain. The door opens again almost immediately.
The woman ushers him into a small foyer lined with frosted glass that prevents him from seeing what lies beyond it. Another door waits on the opposite wall, also composed mostly of frosted glass. The double entryway seems more about obfuscation than security.
The woman locks and chains the front door and then hurriedly moves to unlock the frosted-glass door. She wears a long blue dress that looks simple and old-fashioned, like a robe, with a high neckline and large pockets on either side. Around her neck is a silver chain with a sword, a different design than the one that Zachary wears, thinner and shorter, but similar.
“This way,” she says, pushing the frosted-glass door open.
Should I pretend I’ve been here before or not? That would have been a good question to ask Dorian. Zachary guesses the answer would have been yes, considering he’s supposed to know where the back door is, but it makes that more difficult not to stare.
The hallway is bright and high-ceilinged with white walls, lit by a line of crystal chandeliers running from the foyer to the stairs at the back. A deep blue carpet covers the stairs and flows down into the hall like a waterfall, catching the irregular light that makes it appear even more liquid.
But what Zachary cannot help but stare at are the doorless doorknobs hanging on either side of the hall.
Suspended from white ribbons at varying heights there are brass doorknobs and crystal doorknobs and carved-ivory doorknobs. Some seem to have rusted to the point of staining the length of ribbon to which they cling. Others have gathered greyish-green patinas. Some hang near the ceiling far above Zachary’s head and others skim the floor. Some are broken. Some are attached to escutcheons and others are only knobs or handles. All of them are missing their doors.
Each doorknob has a tag, a string attaching a rectangular piece of paper that reminds Zachary of the type of tag placed on the toes of corpses in mortuaries. He slows his pace so he can take a closer look. He catches city names and numbers he thinks might be latitudes and longitudes. Along the bottom of each tag is a date.
As they walk through the hall the air around them shifts over the ribbons causing the doorknobs to sway gently, knocking into their neighbors with a sorrowful hollow ringing sound.
There are hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Zachary and his escort ascend the waterfall of stairs in silence, the doorknobs echoing behind them.
The stairs turn and loop in both directions but the woman goes up the set on the right. A larger chandelier hangs in the center of the looping stairs, lightbulbs obscured behind droplets of crystal.
Both sides of the stairs lead to the same hall on an upper floor, this one with a lower ceiling and no ribbon-strung doorknobs. This hallway has its own doors, each painted a matte black in stark contrast with the white walls surrounding them. Each