The door marked with the crown is open. The girl steps inside.
“You have returned,” the darkness says.
The girl says nothing. This part of what was not a dream at all has haunted her most, more than the ghosts. This room. This voice.
But she is not afraid.
From the darkness the owl-headed man appears. He is not as tall as she remembers.
“Hello,” the girl says.
“Hello,” the Owl King replies.
They stare at each other in silence for a time. The ghosts watch from the hall, wondering what might happen, marveling at the feather in her heart that the girl cannot see though she feels it fluttering.
“Stay three nights in this place,” the Owl King says to the girl who is no longer a girl.
“Then will you let me go?” the girl asks, though it is not what she means, at all.
“Then you will no longer desire to leave,” the Owl King says, and everyone knows the Owl King speaks only truth.
The girl spends one night, and then another. By the end of the second night she can see the ghosts again. By the third she has no desire to leave, for who would leave their home once they had found it?
She is there, still.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS follows Mirabel down passageways taking sharp turns between halls that he had not noticed before and through doors he had not realized were in fact doors. He slows as they pass over a glass floor, staring down at another hallway full of books below their feet but then hurries to keep up. They arrive back in the Heart in half the time that Zachary expected and Mirabel walks not to the elevator as he had anticipated but over to one of the slumped chandeliers where there hangs a faded grey leather jacket and a black messenger bag.
“Do I need a coat?” Zachary asks as Mirabel puts on her jacket, wondering if he should retrieve his paint-covered one from his room and realizing he forgot to send it down to the Kitchen to be cleaned.
To his left there is a meow and Zachary turns to see the ginger cat sitting in the doorway of the Keeper’s office. Beyond it, the Keeper sits at his desk, writing, though despite the continuing motion of his pen against paper he is watching them intently over the top of his spectacles. Zachary almost lifts a hand to wave but decides not to.
“Oh,” Mirabel says, ignoring both the cat and the Keeper and considering Zachary’s linen pants and turtleneck sweater. “Probably, let’s find you one. You should leave your bag.” Zachary puts his bag down while Mirabel takes a quick turn down the hall nearest the elevator and opens a door to reveal a gigantic mess of a closet, piled with coats and hats and typewriters, boxes of pencils and pens and odd pieces of broken statuary. She grabs a hunter green wool coat with brown elbow patches plucked from the chaos like a perfect-condition vintage-store treasure and hands it to Zachary, nimbly stepping over a crumbling bust on the floor, a lone plaster eye staring forlornly at her boots. “This should fit,” she says, and of course it does.
Zachary follows Mirabel through the door to the glowing antechamber. She presses the button for the elevator and it lights up obediently. The arrow shifts its attention downward.
“Did you drink it?” Mirabel asks as they wait.
“Did I what now?”
She points to the wall where the small glass of liquid had been, opposite the dice.
“Did you drink it?” she repeats.
“Oh…yeah, yeah I did.”
“Good,” Mirabel says.
“Did I have another option?”
“You could pour it out or move the glass to the other side of the room or any number of things. But no one’s ever stayed who didn’t drink it.”
The elevator dings and the doors slide open.
“What did you do with it?” Zachary asks. Mirabel sits on one of the velvet benches and he takes a seat opposite. He’s pretty sure it’s the same elevator but he’s also pretty sure he dripped paint all over it and the velvet benches are worn but spotless.
“Me?” Mirabel says. “Nothing.”
“You left it there?”