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 can hear a low chime from within the building.
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.