“You wanted a happier ending?”
“No…not necessarily happier. I wanted more story. I wanted to know what happened afterward, I wanted the moon to figure out a way to come back even if she couldn’t stay. All those stories are like that, they feel like pieces of bigger stories. Like there’s mo
re that happens beyond the pages.”
Dorian nods, thoughtfully. “Is that a wardrobe?” he asks, gesturing at the piece of furniture on the other side of the room.
“Yes,” Zachary says, distracted into stating the obvious.
“Have you checked it?”
“For what?” Zachary asks but realizes as Dorian’s disbelieving eyebrow rises. “Oh. Oh, no, I haven’t.”
It is, he thinks, the only proper wardrobe he has ever had and after the considerable amount of time he has spent sitting in closets literally and figuratively he cannot believe he has not yet checked this one for a door to Narnia.
Dorian hands the bottle of wine to Zachary and walks over to the wardrobe.
“I have never been particularly fond of Narnia myself,” Dorian says as he runs his fingers over the carved wooden doors. “Too much direct allegory for my tastes. Though it does have a certain romance to it. The snow. The gentlemanly satyr.”
He opens the doors and smiles, though Zachary cannot tell what it is he’s smiling at.
He reaches out an arm and parts the hanging rows of linen and cashmere, slowly, carefully. Drawing the motion out rather than reaching immediately to touch the back of the wardrobe. Taking his time.
He doesn’t even need words to tell a story, a voice somewhere in Zachary’s head observes and he suddenly desperately wishes that he was currently occupying the sweater that Dorian has his hand on and he is so distracted by this thought that it takes him a moment to realize that Dorian has stepped into the wardrobe and vanished.
A man momentarily found in time storms down a hall, finding his way out of time again.
A fallen candelabra is not an unusual thing. The acolytes anticipate them, they have a way of knowing when a flame might tumble. There are methods for avoiding accidents.
Acolytes cannot predict the actions of a man who has been lost in time. They cannot know where or when he will appear. They are not there when and where he does.
There are not as many acolytes as there once were and they are all, at this moment, tending to other matters.
The fire creeps at first and then catches, pulling books from their shelves in curling paper and reducing candles to pools of molten wax.
It tears through the halls, moving like the sea over everything in its path.
It finds the room with the dollhouse and it claims it for its own, an entire universe lost in flame.
The dolls see only brightness and then nothing.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS stares into a wardrobe that contains only a great deal of sweaters and linen shirts and trousers and questions his sanity again.
“Dorian?” he says. He must be hiding in the shadows, curled up beneath hanging garments the way Zachary has sat so many times himself, in a world alone, compact and forgotten.
Zachary reaches a hand through sweaters and shirts, wondering why he would accept shadows as shadows in a place where so much is more than what it seems and where his fingers should touch solid wood they touch nothing instead.
He laughs but it catches in his throat. He steps into the wardrobe, reaching farther and there is emptiness where the back should be, beyond where the wall would have met his fingers.
He takes one step and then another, cashmere brushing against his back. The light from his room fades quickly. He puts a hand out to his side and hits slightly curving solid stone. A tunnel, maybe.
Zachary walks forward. He reaches into the darkness in front of him and a hand grabs his.
“Let’s see where this goes, shall we?” Dorian whispers in his ear.
Zachary grasps Dorian’s hand and thus entwined they proceed through the tunnel as it turns, leading them into another room.
This room is lit by a single candle, placed in front of a mirror so its flame is doubled.