Others when faced with a door will leave it undisturbed, even if their curiosity is piqued. They think they need permission. They believe the door awaits someone else, even if it is in fact waiting for them.
Some will find a door and open it and pass through to see where it leads.
Once there they wander through the stone halls, finding things to look at and things to touch and things to read. They find stories tucked in hidden corners and laid out on tables, as though they had been there always, waiting for their reader to arrive.
Each visitor will find something or someplace or someone that catches their fancy. A book or a conversation or a comfortable chair in a well-curated alcove. Someone will bring them a drink.
They will lose track of time.
Occasionally a visitor will become overwhelmed, disoriented, and dazed by all there is to explore, the space closing around their lungs and their heart and their thoughts, and they will find their way back before much time has passed, back to the familiar surface and the familiar stars and the familiar air, and most will forget that such a place exists, much less that they set foot in it themselves. It will fade like a dream. They will not open their door again. They may forget there was a door at all.
But such reactions are rare.
Most who find the space have sought it, even if they never knew that this place was what they had been seeking.
And they will choose to stay awhile.
Hours or days or weeks. Some will leave and return, keeping the place as an escape, a retreat, a sanctuary. Living lives both above and below.
A few have built their residences on the surface around their doors, keeping them close and protected and preventing others from utilizing them.
Others, once they have passed through their respective door, wish never to return to whatever it was that they left. The lives they left behind become the dreams, waiting not to be returned to but to be forgotten.
These people stay and take up residency and these are the ones who begin to shape what the space will become while they inhabit it.
They live and they work. They consume art and stories and create new art and new stories to add to the shelves and the walls. They find friends and lovers. They put on performances and play games and weave community out of camaraderie.
They throw elaborate festivals and parties. Occasional visitors return for such events, swelling the general population, enlivening even the quieter halls. Music and merriment ring through the ballrooms and the far corners. Bare feet are dipped in the Starless Sea by those who descend to its shores, emboldened by giddiness and wine.
Even those who keep to their private chambers and their books emerge from their solitude on such occasions, and some are persuaded to join the revelry while others content themselves with observation.
Time will pass unmeasured in dancing and delights and then those who choose to leave will begin to find their way to the egress, to be taken back to their respective doors.
They will say their goodbyes to the ones who remain.
The ones who have found their haven in this Harbor.
They have sought and they have found and here they choose to remain, whether they choose a path of dedication or simply a permanent residency.
They live and they work and they play and they love and if they ever miss the world above they rarely admit it.
This is their world, starless and sacred.
They think it impervious. Impenetrable and eternal.
Yet all things change in time.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS arrives at the Algonquin approximately four minutes after he leaves his hotel room. It would have taken even less time if he hadn’t had to wait first for the elevator and then for a cab to pass by on the street.
The party is not quite in full swing but already lively. A line of people waiting to check in crowds the lobby. The hotel is a more classic style than the one Zachary is staying in and feels particularly old-fashioned with the formally dressed crowd, rich dark wood, and potted palms artfully but dimly lit.
Zachary puts on his mask while he waits in line. A woman in a black dress hands out white masks to guests who have not brought their own and Zachary is glad that he did, the white ones are plastic and do not look particularly comfortable, though the effect of them scattered around the room is striking.
He gives his name to the woman at the desk. She does not ask to see his ticket and he tucks it in the pocket of his suit jacket. He checks his coat. He is given a paper wristband that looks like the spine of a book, printed with the date instead of a title. He is informed about the bar (open, tips appreciated) and then he is set free and does not know what to do with himself.
Zachary wanders the party like a ghost, grateful for the mask that allows him to hide in plain sight.
In some respects it is like any number of dressy parties, with chatter and clinking glasses and music that bubbles up from beneath the conversations, carrying the rhythm of everything along with it. Partygoers draped over armchairs and milling in corners in one room, a fairly well-occupied dance floor in another where the music takes over the conversation and insists upon being heard. A party scene from a movie, though a movie that can’t quite settle on issues of time period or hem length. There is an undertone of awkwardness that Zachary recalls