This is not the first time they have stood together on these shores. It will not be the last.
This is a story they will live over and over again, together and apart.
The cage that contains them both is a large one that does not have a key.
Not yet.
The girl pulls the pirate away from the glow of the Starless Sea and into the shadows, to make the most of what moments remain between them before time and fate intervene.
To give him more of her to remember.
After they are found, when the girl meets her death with open eyes and her lover’s screams echoing in her ears, before the starless darkness claims her once again, she can see the oceans of time that rest between this point and their freedom, clear and wide.
And she sees a way to cross them.
The small girl stares with wide brown eyes at each person who comes to observe her. A dark cloud of frizzy hair surrounds her head, stray leaves hiding within it. She holds a door knocker the way a smaller child might handle a rattle or a toy. Tightly. Protectively.
She has been placed in an armchair in one of the galleries, as though she is herself a piece of art. Her feet do not touch the ground. Her head has been examined and some concern has been raised over injury, though she is not bleeding. A bruise blooms near her temple, a greenish hue spreading over light brown skin. It does not seem to bother her. She is given a plate of tiny cakes and eats them in small, serious bites.
She is asked her name. She appears not to understand the question. There is some debate over how translations might work for someone so young (few recall the last time there was a child in this place) but she understands other inquiries: She nods when asked if she is thirsty or hungry. She smiles when someone brings her an old stuffed toy, a rabbit with thinning fur and floppy ears. Only when the rabbit is presented does she relinquish the door knocker, clutching the bunny with equal intensity.
She does not recall her name, her age, anything about her family. When asked how she got there she holds up the door knocker with a pitying look in her large eyes, as the answer is terribly obvious and the people peering down at her are not very observant.
Everything about her is analyzed, from the make of her shoes to her accent as they begin to coerce single words or phrases, but she speaks rarely and all anyone can agree on is that there are hints of Australia or possibly New Zealand, though some insist the slight accent on her English is South African. There are a number of old doors left uncatalogued in each country. The girl does not give reliable geographical information. She remembers people and fairies and dragons with equal clarity. Large buildings and small buildings and forests and fields. She describes bodies of water of indiscernible size that could be lakes or oceans or bathtubs. Nothing to point clearly toward her origin.
Throughout the investigations it remains an unspoken truth that she cannot easily be returned to wherever she has fallen from if her door no longer exists.
There is talk of sending her back through another door, but no one in the dwindling population of residents volunteers for such a mission, and the girl appears happy enough. Does not complain. Does not ask to go home. Does not cry for her parents, wherever they might be.
She is given a room where everything is too big for her. Clothes that fit reasonably well are found and one of the knitting groups provides her with sweaters and socks spun from colorful yarn. Her shoes are cleaned and remain her only pair until she outgrows them, the rubber soles worn through to holes then patched and worn through again.
They call her the girl or the child or the foundling, though the more semantic-minded residents point out that she was not abandoned, not as far as anyone knows, so the term foundling is inaccurate.
Eventually she is called Eleanor, and some say afterward she was named for the queen of Aquitaine, and others claim the choice was inspired by Jane Austen, and still others say she once responded to the request for her name with “Ellie” or “Allira” or something like that. (In truth the person who suggested the name plucked it from a novel by Shirley Jackson but neglected to clarify due to the unfortunate fate of that other, fictional Eleanor.)
“Does she have a name yet?” the Keeper asks, not looking up from his desk, his pen continuing to move across the page.
“They’ve taken to calling her Eleanor,” the painter informs him.
The Keeper puts down his pen and sighs.
“Eleanor,” he repeats, putting the emphasis on the latter syllables, turning the name into another sigh. He picks up his pen and resumes his writing, all without so much as a glance at the painter.
The painter does not pry. She thinks perhaps the name has a particular meaning to him. She has only known him a short amount of time. She decides to stay uninvolved in the matter, herself.
This Harbor upon the Starless Sea absorbs the girl who fell through the remains of a door the way the forest floor consumed the door: She becomes part of the scenery. Sometimes noticed. Mostly ignored. Left to her own devices.
No one takes responsibil
ity. Everyone assumes someone else will do it, and so no one does. They are all preoccupied with their own work, their own intimate dramas. They observe and question and even participate but not for long. Not for more than moments, here and there, scattered through a childhood like fallen leaves.
On that first day, in the chair but before the bunny, Eleanor answers only a single question aloud when asked what she was doing out on her own.
“Exploring,” she says.
She thinks she is doing a very good job of it.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS finds himself in an elevator with a pink-haired lady with a gun who he’s pretty sure has just committed arson on top of the already committed crimes of the day and an unconscious man who might be an attempted murderer and his throbbing head cannot decide if he needs a nap or a drink or why, exactly, he feels more comfortable now in present elevator company than he had before.