Dedication
for Kelly Wood,
who holds open the doors to a thousand worlds,
and in memory of Diana Wynne Jones
Map
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Caroline Carlson
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Copyright
About the Publisher
1
There’s no signpost to mark the end of the world, so you need to know what you’re looking for: a gatehouse, a garden, and a tall brick wall overgrown with flowering vines. The gatehouse bell is broken, but if you’ve managed to travel all the way to the end of the world, you’re obviously persistent enough to knock on the door. You’ll have to wait awhile, too, since the Gatekeeper likes to take her time. Traveling from one world to the next isn’t something a person should do on a whim, and she wants to make sure you mean it.
While you’re waiting, after you’ve checked your watch twice and wondered about the note taped to the door that says BEWARE OF BEES, you might happen to look through the window into the front room, where a girl sits behind a desk piled high with papers. That’s me. My name is Lucy. I’m the one you don’t quite notice as I stamp your passport, collect your travel papers, and wish you the best of luck on your trip. I’m not allowed to take you to the tall brick wall or push aside the vines or unlock the door hidden behind them—only the Gatekeeper can do that—but I like my job. At the end of the world, it’s important to be organized.
This close to the door, things tend to go missing. They’re odds and ends, usually: gloves, keys, spare change, the occasional pencil stub, anything that might slip or squeeze or roll into the space between the worlds. “You’ll get used to it,” the Gatekeeper told me when I moved in. For the most part, she was right. I’d learned to stash extra gloves in my pockets and tie my pencils to the desk with bits of string; I’d started expecting to lose things. But I can’t say I ever expected to lose the Gatekeeper herself.
It happened on an unremarkable Thursday. I’d cleaned the breakfast dishes and was sorting travel papers into stacks on my desk—pink customs declarations to the left, green returnee reports to the right, and blue applications for otherworld travel straight ahead—when the Gatekeeper stomped into the room. This was still unremarkable: the Gatekeeper always stomps. She has wild white hair that frizzes around her face when she’s upset, or when it looks like rain, and she walks with a cane that she thwacks and thumps when she wants to make a point. She’s not a witch, but some people think she might be, and she doesn’t try to persuade them otherwise.
On this particular Thursday, the sky was blue and cloudless, but the Gatekeeper’s hair was already starting to frizz at the ends. As soon as I saw the basket she was carrying, I knew why. It was full of rags and rolls of fabric, sewing needles and thread, wood polish and soap, and a screwdriver with a bright orange handle. “Happy Maintenance Day!” I said.
The Gatekeeper glowered. “Happy isn’t the word I’d choose. I’d rather have my ears nibbled off by a thistle-backed thrunt than have to spend the day with Bernard.” She set down her basket. “Well, maybe just one ear.”
Bernard was the gatekeeper who guarded the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the travelers who passed from his world into ours and making sure no one smuggled out illegal otherworld goods, slipped past without their Interworld Travel papers in order, or stumbled through accidentally. He and the Gatekeeper had never been friendly—but then again, the Gatekeeper didn’t like anyone from the next world over. According to her, Easterners were ignorant and impolite, and besides that, they smelled. Still, twice a year, the Gatekeeper went over to East for the morning to clean and polish the door between the worlds, tighten anything that had come loose, knot the stray threads in the fabric of time and space, and argue with Bernard over which of them got to hold the screwdriver. In the afternoon, both of them came back to Southeast and repeated the whole process on this side of the door. It was fiddly, tedious work, and at the end of the day six months earlier, the Gatekeeper had vowed to retire before Maintenance Day rolled around again, but both of us had known she didn’t really mean it. I couldn’t imagine what the end of the world would be like without her.
“Is Bernard really that bad?” I asked. I still hadn’t met him. You might think that a girl living at the end of the world would have lots of thrilling adventures, but it wasn’t quite like that for me. Even the Gatekeeper hardly ever went to other worlds, and in the year I’d been working as her deputy, I’d never actually been through the door myself.
“Bernard,” the Gatekeeper said, “is always worrying about irregularities. Last Maintenance Day he swore there was something funny about the door hinges, and the time before that he was convinced the air near the worldgate smelled of lemon pie. He always wants to know if I’ve noticed any irregularities on my side, and of course I never have.” She shrugged. “Have you noticed anything irregular, Lucy?”
I thought about it. “The bees seemed upset a few weeks ago,” I said. “They found Henry Tallard wandering near the door without any travel papers. They told me they stung him twenty-three times before he finally ran away.”
“Good for them!” The Gatekeeper cackled. “I don’t care how famous an explorer you are; you can’t go poking around my worldgate without my permission. Henry Tallard has been inconsiderate and nosy as long as I’ve known him, though. That doesn’t sound so irregular to me.”
I couldn’t think of anything else unusual that had happened lately. A whirlwind had sprung up in a corner of the garden, right beside the zinnias, but that happened at least once a month. So did the lightning strikes that zigzagged down the side of the gatehouse; at the end of the world, the weather is always temperamental and usually dramatic. Three otherworld tourists had arrived the day before, passing through Southeast on their way to see the Great Molten Lagoon over in South, and two Interworld Travel employees from headquarters had hurried through the door on business just that morning, but none of them had been remotely interesting. They had all gazed over the top of my head as I took their travel papers, and people who find a vase on a fireplace mantel more fascinating than the human sitting in front of them can’t be all that fascinating themselves. “If anything strange has happened here recently,” I told the Gatekeeper, “it hasn’t happened to me.”
“That’s exactly what I like about you, Lucy,” the Gatekeeper said. “Nothing happens to you. At the end of the world, that’s saying something.” She stom
ped to the coat closet and threw on her cloak. “Unless Bernard finds some more irregularities to complain about, I’ll be back by lunchtime. You know the rules by now, I assume.”
I nodded. The Gatekeeper’s rules were sensible, just the way I liked rules to be. “Don’t open the worldgate, and don’t let anyone through. Make travelers wait here until the maintenance is finished. Don’t leave the end of the world for any reason, and eat my vegetables.”
“And if there’s an emergency?”
“Shout. Scream. Make a general ruckus.” I frowned. “Are you sure you’ll be able to hear all that through the door?”
“I’ve got two perfectly good ears, and you’ve got two strong lungs, which I trust you know how to use.” The Gatekeeper smiled at me, which wasn’t exactly a habit of hers. “Goodbye, Lucy.” She thumped her cane three times, picked up her basket of cleaning supplies, and stomped outside.
I watched from the window as she went down the garden path, her hair throwing a tantrum around her face and her cloak swishing witchily around her ankles. When she reached the wall covered with vines, she drew a key out of her pocket, unlocked the door between the worlds, and squeezed through it. The door closed behind her, and I went back to work.
The Gatekeeper didn’t come back by lunchtime. She wasn’t back for dinner, either. By the time I washed the day’s ink stains from my hands, combed the tangles out of my hair, and crawled underneath the quilt I’d brought from home when I came to live at the end of the world, she still hadn’t returned, and I was starting to worry. It shouldn’t have taken her and Bernard more than a few hours to work on the Eastern side of the door, and even if they’d found some extra snags to mend or bolts to polish, I couldn’t imagine why the Gatekeeper wouldn’t have stuck her head through the worldgate to tell me about it. In my nook at the back of the gatehouse, I lay awake listening for the squeak of door hinges or the thump of the Gatekeeper’s cane.
By sunrise, I was prickling with panic. The Gatekeeper wasn’t snoring in her bedroom or yanking weeds in the garden or calling out from the kitchen to ask whether we had any more milk for porridge. The gatehouse was eerily quiet, and there wasn’t anyone else in sight. In my nightgown and bare feet, I ran down the path to the wall and pushed aside the vines, even though I knew the bees wouldn’t be happy about it. Then I tugged on the door at the end of the world.
It was locked, as usual. At least that was as it should be. “Gatekeeper!” I shouted, using my two strong lungs as well as I could. “Bernard! Can you hear me? Are you all right?” I pounded on the door with both fists as hard as I could. Then I picked up a handful of stones from the garden and started throwing the stones one by one against the wall. “I’m making a general ruckus,” I explained to the bees as they buzzed all around me, investigating the situation. “The Gatekeeper’s been over in East for almost a whole day, and you know how much she hates it there. If that’s not an emergency, I’m not sure what is.”
I kept my ruckus up for a good long while, but if anyone could hear it from the next world over, they must not have been impressed: the door stayed shut. Maybe Bernard had been right after all, and there was something wrong with it. “This,” I said to the bees, “is definitely an irregularity.”
The bees huddled together over my head, humming to each other. After a minute or so, they spread out again to form foot-high letters against the backdrop of the sky.
SPARE KEY?
I’d thought of this, too. The Gatekeeper had taken her key with her, of course, but she always kept a copy tucked in a hatbox in the darkest corner of the coat closet. “In a place like this, where things tend to go missing,” she’d explained to me when I’d first arrived, “having only one gatekey would be extremely foolish. But you’re never to touch the spare one, Lucy, or I’ll make sure you won’t find a respectable job again—in this world or any other. Just ask my last deputy what happened to him.” The Gatekeeper had smiled at me as she’d said this, but I was sure she hadn’t been joking.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” I asked the bees now. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere near that key, and I’m definitely not supposed to open the door.”
EMERGENCY, spelled the bees.
“I know, I know.” The thought of breaking one of the Gatekeeper’s rules made me uncomfortably itchy, but if she was really in trouble on the other side of that door, I wasn’t sure what else to do. “Just out of curiosity,” I said to the bees, “do you know what happened to the Gatekeeper’s last deputy?”
The bees hesitated. They looked a little nervous.
I sighed. “Never mind. I’ll go and get the key.”
The Gatekeeper, I discovered, owned a lot of hats. By the time I found the right dusty hatbox, the one that held a small saw-toothed key instead of a bonnet or a bowler, the sun had risen above the treetops. This gave me something else to worry about. I’d been lucky so far, but eventually some explorer or trader or half-witted adventurer was going to arrive at the gatehouse, waving their papers at me and demanding to go to the next world over. How would I explain what had happened to the Gatekeeper, or when she’d be back? How would I keep an increasingly large and grumpy pack of travelers safely inside? There wasn’t that much space around the dining room table.
I crawled out of the coat closet and dusted myself off. “Stop worrying,” I told myself, holding the spare key tighter. “The Gatekeeper will be home by then.” It would be simple enough to unlock the door and let her through, I thought as I went back down the path toward the wall. I’d never opened a worldgate before, but it looked just like any other door; how complicated could it be?
FINALLY, said the bees.
“I’d like to see you search through forty-three hatboxes,” I told them. They hovered around me as I pushed aside the vines and slipped the gatekey into the lock.
“I’m sorry, Gatekeeper,” I whispered. I turned the key until something clicked. “Please don’t fire me.”
Then I pulled open the door at the end of the world.
2
Not many people get an opportunity to stand with their feet in one world and their eyes gazing into the next—and I didn’t, either. As the door swung toward me, someone tumbled through it.
“Oh dear!” he said as he fell.
I didn’t have time to think. I let go of the doorknob and leaped aside to avoid being squashed, and the door in the wall slammed shut.
It took a few moments for me to realize what had happened. A boy was lying on his back on the ground, and his eyes were wide. He looked older than me—I’d turned thirteen last summer—but not nearly as old as my brother, Thomas, who was twenty-three and extremely grown-up. “Bernard?” I asked, frowning down at him. The bees, who had zipped away in the confusion, flew back to get a better look at the boy. This made his eyes open even wider.
“Who are you?” he asked me. “Where am I? Bees!”
He sounded a little worried, but that was understandable. I was worried, too. “I’m Lucy Eberslee,” I said, “the Gatekeeper’s deputy. You’re at the end of the world, of course. And you’re not Bernard, are you?”
The boy shook his head. “I’m Arthur,” he said, squinting up at me through wire-rimmed glasses. “Did you say the end of the world?” He blinked. “Does the world end in bees?”
Now I was sure something was wrong. The Gatekeeper would have been angry enough if I’d broken just one of her rules, but to open the door and to let an ignorant Easterner crash through it? Her hair would be frizzing around her face for at least the next ten years—not that I’d be working at the gatehouse to see it. “I don’t suppose you have your travel papers?” I asked, feeling desperate. “Your passport? Your customs form? Your visitation fee?” I looked over my shoulder at the gatehouse. “Anything I could file?”
Arthur was still shaking his head. “I think,” he said, “they’re going to sting me.”
He wasn’t wrong. The bees were circling him faster now, and their hum had changed from curious to threatening.
“It’s their job not to let anyone come through the door without permission,” I said. “If you don’t have any papers, how in the worlds did Bernard let you come here?” The Gatekeeper had always said Bernard was useless at his job, but even for him, this was an unthinkable mistake. Traveling to another world without documentation was dangerous, not to mention extremely illegal.
“Why do you keep asking about Bernard?” Arthur winced as he picked himself up off the ground. “I’ve never met a Bernard. My tutor is named Joseph.”
“Your tutor?”
Arthur nodded. “I was supposed to meet him in the library. But I hadn’t read the awful old book he’d assigned me, and I thought maybe I’d hide from him instead. I ran to the back of the library and leaned against a door to catch my breath, and right after that I was falling backward into this garden, which you say is the end of the world, even though it seems like a very nice garden to me, and I think I’ve sprained my ankle.” He winced again. “If you don’t mind my asking, why is it springtime on this side of the door and autumn on that one?”
The bees must have decided Arthur wasn’t an immediate threat, because they stopped circling him and settled for hovering a few feet over his head. I wasn’t quite as convinced. “Let me be sure I’ve got this right,” I said. “You stopped to lean against a door, which just happened to be the door at the end of the world, and no one stopped you? Not someone named Bernard? Not a witchy sort of woman with frizzy hair and a cane?”
“I didn’t see anyone like that,” said Arthur. “I didn’t see anyone at all, except for you!” He looked around the garden and adjusted his glasses. “I don’t think Joseph will ever find me here. Would it be all right with you if I stayed for a while? Just for an hour or—”
“No,” I said. “No way. You’ve got to get back on your side of the door, and I need you to do it right now.” I was more worried than ever about the Gatekeeper, and I couldn’t spend any more time taking care of an otherworld traveler, especially not an illegal one I’d accidentally brought through the worldgate. If anyone found out about that particular disaster, I’d be in at least ten different kinds of trouble, and not just with the Gatekeeper. The Interworld Travel Commission would be downright furious. What if they put me on trial in the House of Governors? What if they found me guilty? I tried not to think about all that as I walked past Arthur and went to open the door in the wall.
The Door at the End of the World Page 1
