The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  “Good,” I said. “You’d better keep not mentioning it, even if someone does ask, all right? We need to get you back home before anyone finds out you’re here illegally, or you’ll be in real trouble. And I wouldn’t trust Henry Tallard to keep a secret like that. The bees don’t like him.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Eberslee. I’ll be stone silent from now on, I promise.” Arthur pantomimed locking his lips and tossing away the imaginary key.

  “Well, you can talk to me,” I told him. “In fact, you’d better, or I’m going to die of boredom on the walk to Florence’s.”

  “Walk?” Arthur didn’t bother unlocking his lips. “To the other end of the world? Unless your world is much smaller than mine is, Miss Eberslee, it sounds like a long trip.”

  “It is.” It had taken me days to travel from my parents’ home in Centerbury out to the gatehouse, and that had only been half the distance. The nearest train station was miles from here; the closer the tracks got to the end of the world, the likelier they were to start changing direction without asking anyone for permission. Explorers like Tallard knew the local routes well enough to make good time, but for the rest of us, it could be a confusing journey, and no one who lived out this way relied on anything other than their own two feet.

  I explained all this to Arthur, who didn’t look particularly happy to hear it. “I should have packed more food,” he said nervously. “Or less food, if I’m going to have to carry it all. I’d just assumed we’d have better transportation. A car, maybe, or bicycles. Even a unicycle might do us some good!”

  I didn’t know what kinds of otherworld devices Arthur was talking about, but he did remind me of something. “A rich tourist gave the Gatekeeper a strange gift last year,” I said, “just after I started working here. The tourist was from South, but he’d bought the gift in East.” It had been so large that he’d had to bundle it up in Southern shrink wrap to get it through the door; I remembered watching the gift expand in the back shed as he’d uncovered it layer by layer. “Anyway, the Gatekeeper hated it. She couldn’t figure out how to use it, so she eventually swore at it and stormed off. I think it was supposed to be handy for traveling, though. I’ve got no idea how to use it, but if it’s from your world . . . well, maybe you’d better take a look.”

  “I’d be glad to,” said Arthur. “Even if it’s a unicycle.” He smiled at me. “I think the hailstorm has moved on, so please, Miss Eberslee, lead the way.”

  4

  Arthur’s eyes lit up at the sight of the Gatekeeper’s traveling contraption. “You do have a car!” he cried. He ran over to peer at its gauges and prod its leather seats. “It must be ninety years old. That tourist gave you an antique.”

  I hadn’t realized that. No wonder the Gatekeeper had had so much trouble with it. “Can you make it go?” I asked.

  “Maybe.” Arthur hopped into the car and began to tinker. “I’ve never tried to drive a car like this. I’ve read a few books about how they work, though. My father loves old cars, and I wanted to impress him. There’s a chance I could make the whole machine burst into flames, but if I don’t . . .” He bit his lip and wiggled levers and toggles in an experimental sort of way. I was sure Arthur would break the Gatekeeper’s traveling contraption as thoroughly as he’d broken the worldgate, and I could hardly stand to watch it happen.

  All at once, the car started to shudder and growl. I jumped and covered my ears, but Arthur was grinning. “Runs like a dream!” he shouted over the din.

  I went back to the gatehouse to get my rucksack and the picnic hamper, and a little while after that, we were on our way to Florence’s house at the other end of the world. Arthur wore a permanent frown of concentration as he maneuvered the car over the dirt roads, but whatever he was doing seemed to work well enough, and we bumped along at an alarming speed. Every so often, and for no reason I could fathom, Arthur squeezed a rubber bulb to make a terrible honking noise that sent squirrels and sparrows scurrying for their lives. I sat next to him, shouting out directions and hoping the whole contraption wouldn’t fall apart underneath us.

  LOVELY DAY FOR A DRIVE, the bees spelled out as they flew alongside the car. Most of the colony had stayed at home to protect the door in the wall, jammed though it was, but several of the younger and more adventurous members had come with us. I was grateful for the familiar company; it made the leaving easier. There’d been no time for one last walk around the gatehouse, one last whiff of the flowers in the garden, or one last glance at the door in the wall, where I’d hastily tacked up a sign that said Out of Order and hoped that would be enough to keep the likes of Henry Tallard away for at least a few days. I thought about how I’d walked down this same dirt road for the first time only a year ago, lugging the very same rucksack, anxious to start my new job and trying to ignore the sensation that I’d been wandering in circles for the better part of an hour. If the Gatekeeper hadn’t come out to find me and introduce herself, I’d probably still be wandering.

  “Haven’t we passed that tree before?” Arthur asked now, squinting over the steering wheel. “The squat one with purple berries?”

  I nodded. “Just keep going straight,” I said. “The end of the world has a tricky effect on directions, but it’s best to be persistent.”

  Arthur opened his mouth halfway, as though he wanted to ask more than a few questions about this, but to my relief, he thought better of it. We trundled along in silence for a while. Just after we’d passed the purple-berried tree for the fourth time, the road suddenly curved out of the forest, into a meadow, and toward a pond full of paddling ducks who seemed surprised to see us. Arthur’s shoulders came down from around his ears. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said happily.

  Once we’d passed the duck pond, the end of the world must have lost its pull on things, because the roads finally started behaving exactly the way you’d expect them to. They took us past tiny towns populated mostly with sheep, and then through larger ones where children ran outside to see our car as it rumbled by. DON’T MIND US, the bees spelled out. JUST PASSING THROUGH.

  Arthur had plenty to say as well. “I still can’t quite believe it,” he told me. “This whole business about other worlds, I mean. This morning I was eating buttered toast and wondering where I’d left my umbrella, and now I’m a traveler in a strange new land!”

  I pointed out as nicely as I could that the land was really only new to him, and that the rest of us had actually been here for quite a while. “And it’s not strange,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it is. Is your world very different from this one?”

  Arthur looked around at the trees and fields and sky. “Our trees are taller,” he said finally, “and our sheep are a touch more woolly, but other than that, it’s remarkably similar. Do you have umbrellas here? Or buttered toast?”

  “Yes,” I said, “both of them.”

  “That’s good news,” said Arthur cheerfully. “What about the other six worlds? Are they similar, too?”

  “Some of them are.” We’d brought A Visitor’s Guide to All the Worlds with us, and I pulled it out and unfolded it. If I could teach Arthur a few things as we drove, he might not ask quite so many questions at Florence’s. “Each world has something about it that makes it different from the others,” I explained, “and they all depend on one another to survive. Take Northeast, for example.” I pointed to the little brown circle in the top right corner of the map. “It’s famous for its farms. The government there sells meat and eggs and vegetables all across the worlds, especially to the places where people can’t grow food of their own. It doesn’t get much money from tourism, though, since the whole place smells like cows.” I’d met enough otherworld travelers by now to know that Northeast was considered a pass-through: a place you were forced to pass through on your way somewhere else. More than a few travelers thought Southeast was a pass-through, too, and they hadn’t been shy about telling me so when I stamped their passports and asked how long they’d be staying.

  “Tha
t world looks exciting.” Arthur took a hand off the steering wheel and jabbed a finger toward the big blue world next to Northeast. An illustrated ship sailed across the map toward it.

  “That’s North,” I told him. “North’s a maritime world. It’s lots of islands, actually, spread around a huge sea, and the islands are usually at war with one another. Half the world population is in the navy, and the other half wishes they were.” At the gatehouse, I’d met a lot of travelers headed to North: explorers planning to sail through its archipelagos, customers looking to buy fish or gunpowder, and tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of a thrilling battle at sea.

  Tourists loved traveling to Northwest, too. It was a small green circle on the map. “Northwest is always sunny and warm,” I told Arthur, “and it’s got the Ungoverned Wilderness, which is a leafy old forest you can wander through for days. Next to that is West, which is huge. They’ve got a knack for technology. If you want a gravity-free skyzoomer or an encyclopedic brainchip, West is the place to get it.”

  Arthur maneuvered the car around a flock of wandering geese. “I’m not sure I do want those things.”

  The next world on the map was a pale yellow dot next to the vast gray circle of West. “Southwest is all a desert,” I explained. “It’s very hot, and there’s something special about its sand. It’s not quite solid and not quite liquid, and you can make all sorts of strange things with it if you melt it down. West buys tons of sand from Southwest to use in their inventions. And then there’s South.” I pointed to the large purple world at the bottom of the map. “South has magic. They’ve got dragons and cloaks of invisibility and spells to make you fall in love and back out of it.”

  AND BEES, the bees reminded me. NATURALLY.

  “What about my world?” Arthur asked. “What is East known for? What’s our specialty?”

  I’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask. “East is . . . self-sufficient.” It was a nice way of saying standoffish. “Easterners can grow or make almost everything they need, and almost none of you even know that other worlds exist. But you depend on us, too—for stories, mostly.” The Gatekeeper had told me that otherworld tales had a habit of slipping through the worldgates, and most of them eventually found their way to East. On more than one occasion, an Easterner had overheard a tidbit of gossip from an explorer, written it down, and convinced herself she’d made the whole story up. “If East weren’t connected to the other seven worlds,” I told Arthur, “none of you would have any imagination to speak of.”

  Luckily, Arthur didn’t seem to take offense. He was too busy trying to look at the map without driving us into a pond or a ditch. “I think I’d most like to visit the magical world,” he said, “but I’d like to see all of them, really, even the one with all the cows. Which is your favorite world to visit, Miss Eberslee?”

  The car rattled over a bumpy patch of road, and I squirmed in my seat. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been to any of the other worlds. It wasn’t something I liked to talk about. Everyone assumed that someone with a job like mine would have visited all eight worlds herself—or at least a respectable number, like four or five. My work at the gatehouse kept me too busy to travel, though, and it was starting to make my job a little awkward. The people I met on their way to East always wanted to chat about which part of that world was my favorite, or if I’d ever been to far-off cities with names like Jakarta and Vladivostok, Sacramento and Pittsburgh. To tell the truth, I’d never even heard of these places. I wasn’t about to let Arthur know it, though. “Oh,” I said, trying to sound convincing, “I like all the worlds equally. It’s impossible to pick a favorite.”

  Arthur nodded and kept driving, but I wasn’t entirely sure he’d believed me. Even he had probably heard of Pittsburgh.

  The road to Florence’s house took us toward Centerbury, the capital of Southeast and the closest thing we had to a city, before shifting course and winding up into the mountains. Once we’d reached the outskirts of town, Arthur steered the car to the side of the road and fumbled with levers and pedals until it coughed to a stop. “I don’t have any idea what time it is,” he said, “but I’d like some dinner. Care for a sandwich, Miss Eberslee?”

  I did care for one, as a matter of fact. Arthur had stacked a dozen paper-wrapped packets of sandwiches in the picnic hamper, and to my surprise, the first one I bit into was completely delicious. So was the second. I leaned back in my seat and dabbed tomato juice from my chin.

  Arthur had climbed out of the car and found a place to sit on a rocky outcropping looking over the city. “I’ve got another question for you, Miss Eberslee,” he said, “if that’s all right.”

  I was used to answering questions from otherworld travelers, although most of them weren’t quite as inquisitive as Arthur. “It’s fine,” I told him. “And you might as well call me Lucy. I don’t really mind.”

  “All right. Lucy, then.” He grinned. “Who’s your famous relative?”

  I sat up straight again, too fast. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve been wondering all day. That explorer wanted to know if you were related to someone, and you grimaced at him in just the same way you’re grimacing at me now. I’ve got a few horrible relations of my own, so I recognize the look.”

  “Well,” I said, “they’re not horrible. That’s the problem.”

  “Oh!” said Arthur through a mouthful of lettuce. “Of course. You’re right. Wonderful relations can be even worse.”

  It was the sort of thing most people would have said as a joke, but Arthur actually sounded as though he understood. I didn’t talk about my family as a rule, but I’d already broken so many rules that day; what was the harm in breaking one more? “It’s my brother,” I said, “and both of my parents. They’re all extremely important, so I’m not sure which one Henry Tallard was asking about. My parents are retired now, but my mother used to sit in the House of Governors, and my father was a diplomat. He traveled all over the worlds, talking to impressive people about how their world and ours should be the best of friends. And my brother, Thomas, is a member of the Interworld Travel Commission. He’s one of the people who’s going to be furious when he hears we broke that door, by the way.” I sighed. “My parents are very proud of him.”

  “I see your problem,” said Arthur. “Being an Eberslee sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It is!” I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but even the bees jumped a little when I said it. “I love my family; of course I do, but they can be . . . exhausting.”

  “They must be proud of you, too, being a gatekeeper and all.”

  “Deputy gatekeeper.” I hugged my rucksack to my chest. Getting the offer of work at the end of the world had been a huge relief. I’d done well enough in school, but I’d never really stood out much. Even my teachers had a habit of not quite remembering I was there unless they read about Thomas in the news or needed a favor from my mother or advice from my father. In the last year of school, when my classmates and I were finally old enough for apprenticeships, all the usual positions were given to students who actually got noticed once in a while, and I’d been the only one left without a placement.

  Then Thomas had come home for the weekend with news about a spot opening up in Interworld Travel. It was a junior position, he’d explained, with not much salary to speak of, but if I was interested, he’d pass my application along. A few weeks after that, my parents were teary-eyed with joy that their little Lucy was going to make something of herself after all, and the Gatekeeper was teaching me where to put the pink forms, and the green forms, and the blue ones. I hadn’t seen my family for ages, but I did hope they were proud of me. Of course, I couldn’t help wondering just how many strings Thomas had pulled to convince the Gatekeeper to hire me, or how disappointed everyone would be when they found out how thoroughly I’d ruined things that morning.

  “What about your family?” I asked Arthur. “Will they be missing you at home?”

  Arthur laughed a little and tossed a pebble down the hillside. “I
f I’m not back in a few days, my tutor might get suspicious, and after a month or so it might occur to my father that I haven’t come downstairs for dinner in a while. He’s got eight sons, though, so he won’t mind misplacing one.” He frowned. “It’s not going to take me a month to get back to East, is it?”

  I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t. “I’m sure Florence will be able to send you home quickly,” I told him. I’d never met Florence myself, but I knew the Gatekeeper trusted her, and I trusted the Gatekeeper. “She probably fixes broken doors all the time. She’ll know how to make everything all right.”

  “In that case,” said Arthur, “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  5

  Florence’s house was on the far side of the farthest mountain, where the ground was rocky, the wind was strong, and the trees were scraggly and stunted, as if they’d bumped up against the ceiling of the world. We reached it just after lunchtime on our third day of driving.

  As soon as we did, I could tell something was wrong.

  “I’m worried,” I said to Arthur. He’d turned off the car’s engine, and the quietness around us rang in my ears. The only sounds were the rustle of wind and the happy hum of the bees as they flew inside to say hello to Florence. “We got here too quickly.”

  “I thought we did.” Arthur climbed out of the car and stretched. “Southeast must be awfully small.”

  It was, but that wasn’t what I’d meant. “We didn’t get lost,” I explained. “We drove straight here, and we never got lost, or even a little muddled; we didn’t pass the same trees or streams or boulders seven times in a row. And we didn’t run into any strange weather.”

  “We did!” said Arthur. “Don’t you remember the snowstorm? My fingers are still a little numb from it.” He wiggled them experimentally.