The back of the stone chair has slid down into the floor.
The statue is hollow.
There’s a staircase below her.
At the bottom of the stairs there is a light.
Zachary looks back at the cat sitting beneath the feet of the hovering marble fox, curled in a multitude of tails. The only tail that twitches is the cat’s.
The cat meows at him.
Maybe all moments have meaning.
Somewhere.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins steps inside the Queen of the Bees and descends farther into the depths.
Eleanor does not know what to do with the baby.
The baby cries and eats and cries some more and sometimes sleeps. The order or duration of these activities has no logical progression.
She expected the Keeper to be more helpful but he is not. He does not like the baby. He refers to it as the child and not by name, though Eleanor herself is at fault for that because she has not yet given the baby a name.
(Eleanor used to be the child herself. She does not know when that stopped or what she is now if she is something else.)
The baby does not require a name. There are no other babies to confuse it with. It is the only one. It is special. Unique. It is the baby. Sometimes the child, but it is very much a baby.
Before the baby was born Eleanor read all the books she could find about babies but books did not prepare her for the actual baby. Books do not scream and wail and fuss and stare.
She asks the Keeper questions but he does not answer them. He keeps the door to his office closed. She asks the painter and the poets and they help for hours at a time, the painter more than the poets, allowing her to slip into too-short dreamless sleeps but eventually it is always her and it, alone together.
She writes notes to the Kitchen.
She is not certain the Kitchen will reply. She sometimes wrote it tiny notes when she was younger, it would not always respond. If she wrote Hello, it would write Hello in return and it would answer questions, but once Eleanor asked who it was down there cooking and preparing and fixing things but that note went unanswered.
She sends her first baby-related inquiry with trepidation, relieved when the light turns on.
The Kitchen provides excellent responses to her questions. Detailed lists of things to try. Politely worded encouragements and suggestions.
The Kitchen sends up bottles of warm milk for the baby and cupcakes for Eleanor.
The Kitchen suggests she read to the baby and Eleanor feels stupid for not trying that before. She misses Sweet Sorrows and regrets giving it away. She feels sorry for pulling pages out, all the bits she didn’t like when she first read it. She wonders if she would like those parts better now if she could read them again but they are lost, folded into stars and thrown in dark corners like her old nightmares. She tries to remember why it was she did not like them. There was the part about the stag in the snow that made her heart hurt, and the bit about the rising sea and someone lost an eye but she does not recall who. She thinks now it is silly to be upset by the fates of characters who do not exist to the point of ripping out pages and hiding them away but it made sense to her at the time. This place made more sense when she was a rabbit, sneaking through the darkness like she owned it, like the world was hers. She can’t remember when that changed.
Perhaps she herself is a page that was torn from a story and folded into a star and thrown in the shadows to be forgotten.
Perhaps she should not steal books from hidden archives only to rip out their pages and then give them away, but it is too late to change any of that now and a beloved book is still beloved even if it was stolen to begin with and imperfect and then lost.
Eleanor remembers most of Sweet Sorrows well enough to repeat parts of it to the baby, the stories about the pirate, the dollhouse, the bit about the girl who fell through a door that seems so familiar she sometimes thinks she lived it, though she read it so many times it almost feels as though she did.
The Kitchen sends a stuffed rabbit with soft brown fur and floppy ears.
The baby likes the bunny more than it likes most things.
Between the bunny and the reading Eleanor manages to find some calm, even if it is often temporary.
She misses Simon. She is done crying, though she spent plenty of nights and days sobbing once she had been convinced there was no getting back into the room and that even if she did she would never see Simon again.
She knows she will never see him again because the Keeper told her as much. She will never see him again because he never saw her again. The Keeper knows because he was there. Has always been here. He mumbled something about time and waved her away.