I feel like I’ve heard of the Owl King before but I don’t know where.
* * *
—
I asked Elena what she’d wanted to talk to Z about after class that night and she said he’d been in the library checking out some weird book that wasn’t in the system and then he came back after to track down other books from the same donation, total library-detective mode (her words) but she didn’t know why and he hadn’t said. She did mention a couple of the books (including the first one) were still missing, so maybe he has them.
She gave me the name she gave him from the book donation. J. S. Keating, so I did some digging. A lot of digging.
* * *
—
Jocelyn Simone Keating, born 1812. Not a lot on her, no marriage records or subsequent kids or anything. Sounds like she was disowned. Other Keatings: brother, married, no kids, just a “ward” without a name recorded dead as a teen. Brother’s wife died, he remarried, wife number two died and later the brother died ancient and alone I guess. There were two other Keating cousins who didn’t make it out of their twenties. Then that’s, like, the end of the Keatings, or at least that branch since it’s a common enough name.
No death record for Jocelyn. Not that I can find.
But the books were donated in her name, like, less than thirty years ago? Elena let me dig through the library files when her supervisor was on his lunch break and I found the full record, though it wasn’t digital at the time because they were still transferring and it’s a low-res scan of a handwritten paper and half of it is illegible.
But there’s something about a foundation and instructions for donations and how does a lady leave her library to a bunch of different universities in different countries when some of them didn’t even exist when she died? I mean, seriously, even if she lived to be a hundred this school was founded, like…longhand math, boo…something like forty or fifty years after that?
Elena helped me find some of the other donated books and some of them are, like, way too modern to belong to a lady in 18whatever. There’s Jazz Age stuff in there. Maybe it wasn’t *her* library, maybe it was a library named after her? Or it’s just the foundation and the name is a carry-over from something earlier. I can’t find info about the Keating Foundation anywhere, it’s like it’s not a thing.
One of those books had that bee drawing in it again. Bee-key-sword in faded ink along the back cover underneath the barcode sticker.
This is all so weird. And not, like, good weird. I love a good weird.
* * *
—
I shut down my Twitch account because someone keeps spamming my chat with bee emotes.
I got a text on my phone from Unknown that says Stop snooping, Miss Hawkins.
I didn’t reply.
All my texts to or from Z are gone.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER sits in a chair surrounded by keys in the middle of a starlit forest talking to a woman made of snow and ice.
At first he does not know what to say.
He does not think of himself as a storyteller. He never has.
He thinks of all the tales he grew up feasting on, myths and fairy tales and cartoons.
He remembers Sweet Sorrows and its test for keepers, the storytelling surrounded by keys and how they could tell any story but their own, but he does not have a story.
He has nothing practiced. Nothing prepared. But the request is so open-ended.
Tell me a story.
The request comes with no specifications or requirements.
So Zachary begins to speak, haltingly at first but gradually becoming more comfortable, as though he is talking to an old friend in a dimly lit bar over well-crafted cocktails instead of sitting in a snow-covered fairy-tale wood addressing a silent effigy.
He starts with an eleven-year-old boy finding a painted door in an alleyway. He describes the door in great detail, down to its painted keyhole. He tells her how the boy did not open it. How afterward he wished that he had and how at odd moments over the following years he would think about it, how the door haunted him and how it haunts him, still.