Every Heart a Doorway

by Seanan McGuire

  Jill gave Nancy a sidelong look. “Did that help at all?”

  “Not really,” said Nancy. “I never thought that … You know, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I was a kid, and I never thought about what it would be like for Alice when she went back to where she’d started. I figured she’d just shrug and get over it. But I can’t do that. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in my real bed, in my real room, and all of this is the dream.”

  “It isn’t home anymore, is it?” asked Jill gently. Nancy shook her head, blinking back tears. Jill reached across the table to pat her hand. “It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less. How long has it been for you?”

  “Just under two months.” Seven weeks, four days since the Lord of the Dead had told her she needed to be sure. Seven weeks, four days since the door to her chambers had opened on the basement she’d left behind so long before, in the house she thought she’d left behind forever. Seven weeks, four days since her screaming had alerted her parents to an intruder and they had come pounding down the steps, only to sweep her into an unwanted embrace, bawling about how upset they’d been when she had disappeared.

  She’d been gone for six months, from their perspective. One month for each of the pomegranate seeds that Persephone had eaten, back at the beginning of things. Years for her, and months for them. They still thought she was dyeing her hair. They still thought she was eventually going to tell them where she’d been.

  They still thought a lot of things.

  “It gets better,” repeated Jill. “It’s been a year and a half, for us. But we don’t lose hope. I keep my iron levels up. Jack has her experiments—”

  Jack didn’t say anything. She just stood and walked away from the table, leaving her half-eaten dinner behind.

  “We’re not cleaning up after you!” shouted Sumi, around a mouthful of food.

  In the end, of course, they did. There was really no other option.

  3

  BIRDS OF A FEATHER

  ACCORDING TO WHAT Nancy’s parents had told her about the school, the mandatory group therapy had been one of the big selling points. What better way to bring their teenage daughter back from whatever strange hole she’d crawled into than having her sit and talk to people who’d suffered similar traumas, all under the watchful eye of a trained professional? As she sank into the embrace of a thickly padded armchair, surrounded by teens who twitched, chewed their hair, or stared moodily off into space without speaking, she had to wonder what they would have thought of the reality.

  Then the eight-year-old walked into the room.

  She was dressed like a middle-aged librarian, wearing a pencil skirt and a white blouse, both of which were much too old for her. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, no-nonsense bun. The overall effect was of a child playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. Nancy sat up straighter. The school’s brochures had mentioned an age range of twelve to nineteen, allowing both the precocious and those who needed a little time to catch up to attend. It hadn’t said anything about children under the age of ten.

  The girl stopped at the center of the room, turning to look at each of them in turn. One by one, the fidgeters became still; the hair chewers stopped chewing; even Sumi, who’d been doing an elaborate cat’s-cradle with a piece of yarn, lowered her hands and sat quietly. The girl smiled.

  “For those of you who’ve been here for a while, welcome to Wednesday night group. We’re going to be sharing with the high Wicked visitors tonight, but as always, the discussion is open to all.” Her voice matched her body. Her tone was older, cadenced like an adult woman’s, rendered high and strange by her prepubescent vocal cords. She looked at Nancy as she continued. “For those of you who are new here, my name is Lundy, and I am a fully licensed therapist with a specialization in child psychology. I’m going to be helping you through your recovery process.”

  Nancy stared. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  As Lundy walked over to the one remaining chair, Kade leaned over and murmured, “She’s one of us, only she went to a high Logic, high Wicked world where they kicked visitors out on their eighteenth birthdays. She didn’t want to leave, so she asked one of the local apothecaries to help her. This was the result. Eternal childhood.”

  “Not eternal, Mr. Bronson,” said Lundy sharply. Kade sat up and settled back in his own chair, shrugging unapologetically. Lundy sighed. “You would have gotten this at your orientation, Miss, ah…?”

  “Whitman,” said Nancy.

  “Miss Whitman,” said Lundy. “As I was saying, you would have gotten this at your orientation, but: I’m not living out an eternal childhood. I’m aging in reverse, growing one week younger for every month that passes. I’ll live a long, long time. Longer, maybe, than I would have had I continued aging in the usual way. But they threw me out anyway, because I had broken the rules. I’ll never marry, or have a family of my own, and my daughters will never find their way to the door that once led me to the Goblin Market. So I suppose I’ve learnt the danger of making importune bargains with the fae, and can now serve as a warning to others. I am still, however, your therapist. It’s amazing, the degrees you can get over the Internet these days.”

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Nancy.

  Lundy waved a hand as she sat, dismissing Nancy’s apology. “It’s no matter, honestly. Everyone finds out eventually. Now. Who wants to share first?”

  Nancy sat in silence as the other students talked. Not all of them: slightly less than half seemed to have been to a world that fell on the “Wicked” side of the compass, or maybe that was just the number who felt like sharing. Jill recited an impassioned paean to the moors and wind-racked hills of the world she’d gone to with her sister, while Jack only muttered something about burning windmills and the importance of fire safety in laboratory settings.

  A girl with hair the color of moonlight on wheat stared at her hands while she talked about boys made of glass whose kisses had cut her lips but whose hearts had been kind and true. The girl who was too beautiful to look at directly said something about Helen of Troy, and half the room laughed, but not because it was funny; because she was so beautiful that they wanted nothing more than they wanted her to like them.

  Kade made a brief, bitter speech about how Wickedness and Virtue were just labels and didn’t mean anything; the world he’d been to was labeled “Virtue” on all the maps, but it had still cast him out as soon as it realized what he was.

  Finally, silence fell, and Nancy realized everyone was looking at her. She shrank back in her seat. “I don’t know if the place I went was wicked or not,” she said. “It never seemed wicked to me. It always seemed … kind, at the root of things. Yes, there were rules, and yes, there were punishments if you broke them, but they were never unfair, and the Lord of the Dead took good care of everyone who served in his halls. I don’t think it was wicked at all.”

  “How can you be sure, though?” asked Sumi, and her voice was gentle, underneath her jeering tone. “You can’t even say Wicked right. Maybe it was evil to the core, filled with wiggling worms and bad stuff, and you couldn’t see it.” She slanted a glance toward Jill, almost as if she were checking the other girl’s reaction. Jill, whose eyes were fixed on Nancy, didn’t appear to notice. “You shouldn’t close doors just because you don’t like what’s on the other side.”

  “I know because I know,” said Nancy doggedly. “I didn’t go anyplace bad. I went home.”

  “That’s the thing people forget when they start talking about things in terms of good and evil,” said Jack, turning to look at Lundy. She adjusted her glasses as she continued, “For us, the places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

  “And on that note, I suppose we’re done for the evening.” Lundy stood. Nancy r
ealized with a start that somewhere in the middle of the session, she’d started thinking of the little girl as an adult woman. It was the way she carried herself: too mature for the body she inhabited, too weary for the face she wore. “Thank you, everyone. Miss Whitman, I’ll see you tomorrow morning for orientation. Everyone else, I’ll see you tomorrow evening, when we’ll be speaking to those who have traveled to the high Logic worlds. Remember, only by learning about the journeys of others can we truly understand our own.”

  “Oh, lovely,” muttered Jack. “I do so love being in the hot seat two nights running.”

  Lundy ignored her, walking calmly out of the room. As soon as she was gone, Eleanor appeared in the doorway, all smiles.

  “All right, my crumpets, it’s time for good little girls and boys to go to bed,” she said, and clapped her hands. “Off you go. Dream sweetly, try not to sleepwalk, and please don’t wake me up at midnight trying to force a portal to manifest in the downstairs pantry. It isn’t going to happen.”

  The students rose and scattered, some moving off in pairs, others going alone. Sumi went out the window, and no one commented on her disappearance.

  Nancy walked back to her room, pleased to find it bathed in moonlight and filled with silence. She disrobed, garbed herself in a white nightgown from the pile Kade had given her, and stretched out on her bed, lying atop the covers. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and slipped into sweet, motionless sleep, her first day done, and her future yet ahead of her.

  * * *

  ORIENTATION WITH LUNDY the next morning was odd, to say the least. It was held in a small room that had been a study once, before it had been filled with blackboards and the smell of chalk dust. Lundy stood at the center of it all, one hand resting on a wheeled stepladder, which she moved from blackboard to blackboard as the need to climb up and point to some complicated diagram arose. The need seemed to arise with dismaying frequency. Nancy sat very still in the room’s single chair, her head spinning as she struggled to keep up.

  Lundy’s explanation of the cardinal directions of portals had been, if anything, less helpful than Jack’s, and had involved a lot more diagrams, and some offhanded comments about minor directions, like Whimsy and Wild. Nancy had bitten her tongue to keep from asking any questions. She was deeply afraid that Lundy would attempt to answer them, and then her head might actually explode.

  Finally, Lundy stopped and looked expectantly at Nancy. “Well?” she asked. “Do you have any questions, Miss Whitman?”

  About a million, and all of them wanted to be asked at once, even the ones she didn’t want to ask at all. Nancy took a deep breath and started with what seemed to be the easiest: “Why are there so many more girls here than boys?”

  “Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy. It made sense, in its terrible way. Most of the boys she’d known were noisy creatures, encouraged to be so by their parents and friends. Even when they were naturally quiet, they forced themselves to be loud, to avoid censure and mockery. How many of them could have slipped through an old wardrobe or into a rabbit’s den and simply disappeared without sending up a thousand alarms? They would have been found and dragged back home before they reached the first enchanted mirror or climbed the first forbidden tower.

  “We’ve always been open to male students; we just don’t get many.”

  “Everyone here … everyone seems to want to go back.” Nancy paused, struggling with the question that was trying to form. Finally, she asked, “How is it that everyone wants to go back? I thought people who went through this sort of thing mostly just wanted to go back to their old lives and forget that they’d ever known anything else.”

  “This isn’t the only school, of course,” said Lundy. She smiled at Nancy’s surprise. “What, you thought Miss West could sweep up every child who’d ever stumbled into a painting and discovered a magical world on the other side? It happens all over the world, you know. The language barriers alone would make it impossible, as would the expense. There are two schools in North America, this campus and our sister school in Maine. That’s where the students who hated their travels go, to learn how to move on. How to forget.”

  “So we’re here to do … what?” asked Nancy. “Learn how to dwell? Eleanor dresses like she’s still living on the other side of the mirror. Sumi is…” She didn’t have the words for what Sumi was. She stopped speaking.

  “Sumi is a classic example of someone who embraced life in a high Nonsense world,” said Lundy. “She can’t be blamed for what it made of her, any more than you can be blamed for the way you seem to stop breathing when no one’s looking at you. She’s going to need a lot of work before she’s ready to face the world outside again, and she has to want to do it. That’s what determines which school is better for you: the wanting. You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it’s better than admitting the journey’s over. We don’t teach you how to dwell. We also don’t teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”

  There was one more question that needed to be asked, a question bigger and more painful than all the questions before it. Nancy closed her eyes for a moment, allowing herself to sink into stillness. Then she opened them and asked, “How many of us have gone back?”

  Lundy sighed. “Every student I’ve given this orientation to has asked that question. The answer is, we don’t know. Some people, like Eleanor—like me—go back over and over again before we wind up staying in one world or the other for good. Others only take one trip in their lives. If your parents choose to withdraw you, or if you choose to withdraw yourself, we’ll have no way of knowing what becomes of you. I know of three students who have returned to the worlds they left behind. Two were high Logic, both Fairylands. The third was high Nonsense. An Underworld, like the one you visited—although not the same, I’m afraid. That one was accessed by walking through a special mirror, under the full moon. The girl we lost to that world was home for the holidays when the door opened for her a second time. Her mother broke the glass after she went through. We learned later that the mother had also been there—it was a generational portal—and had wanted to spare her daughter the pain of returning.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy, in a very small voice.

  “The chances are, Miss Whitman, that you’ll live out your days in this world. You may tell people of your adventures, when they’re more distant, and when speaking of them hurts somewhat less. Many of our graduates have found that sort of sharing to be both cathartic and lucrative. People do so love a good fantasy.” Lundy’s expression was sorrowful but kind, like that of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. “I won’t stand here and say the door is closed forever, because there’s no way of being sure. But I will tell you the odds were against you going in the first place, and that those same odds are against you now. They say lightning never strikes twice. Well, you’re far more likely to be struck repeatedly by lightning than you are to find a second door.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy again.

  “I’m sorry.” Then Lundy smiled, ridiculously bright. “Welcome to school, Miss Whitman. We hope that we can make you better.”

  PART II

  WITH YOUR LOOKING-GLASS EYES

  4

  LIGHTNING TO KISS THE SKY

  THE BUILDING WAS BIGGER than its population, filled with empty rooms and silent spaces. But all of them felt like they harbored the ghosts of the students who had tried—and failed—to find their way back to the worlds t
hat had rejected them, and so Nancy fled to the outside. She hated to rush, but the sun burnt so badly that she actually ran for the deepest copse of trees she could find, shielding her eyes with her arm. She flung herself into the welcome shade of the grove, blinking back tears brought on as much by the light as by her dismay. Setting her back to an ancient oak, she sank to the ground, buried her face against her knees, and settled into perfect stillness as she wept.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” The voice belonged to Jill, soft and wistful and filled with painful understanding. Nancy raised her head. The gossamer blonde was perched on a tree root, her pale lavender gown arranged to drape just so around her slender frame, a parasol resting against her left shoulder and blocking the sun that filtered down through the branches. Her choker today was deep purple, the color of elderberry wine.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nancy, wiping away her tears with slow swipes of her hand. “I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

  “It’s the shadiest spot on the grounds. I’m impressed, actually. It took me weeks to find the place.” Jill’s smile was kind. “I wasn’t trying to say you should leave. I just meant, well, it’s hard being here, surrounded by all these people who went to their pastel dream worlds full of sunshine and rainbows. They don’t understand us.”

  “Um,” said Nancy, glancing at Jill’s pastel gown.

  Jill laughed. “I don’t wear these because I want to remember where I’ve been. I wear them because the Master liked it when I dressed in pale colors. They showed the blood better. Isn’t that why you wear white? Because your Master liked to see you that way?”

  “I…” Nancy stopped. “He wasn’t my master, he was my Lord, and my teacher, and he loved me. I wear black and white because color is reserved for the Lady of Shadows and her entourage. I’d like to join them someday, if I can prove myself, but until then, I’m supposed to serve as a statue, and statues should blend in. Standing out is for people who’ve earned it.” She touched the pomegranate ribbon in her hair—and one piece of color she had earned—before asking, “You had a … master?”