The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  “Don’t touch that,” I whispered. “It might be poisonous.”

  Mr. Silos cleared off two straight-backed chairs and steered us into them. “Sorry about the mess,” he said. “If we’d known Interworld Travel would be making a visit, we would have cleared this room out days ago.”

  Rosemary sat in the center of the sofa. “You can’t tell anyone what you’ve seen here,” she said, “or I’ll feed you both to a thistle-backed thrunt.”

  “What’s that?” said Arthur.

  Rosemary glowered at us. “You don’t want to find out.”

  I didn’t trust Rosemary much, but I believed her about that. “Did your pa smuggle all these goods into Southeast, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t smuggle anything at all.” Mr. Silos settled down on the sofa next to Rosemary. “It’s true I was a smuggler once, but that old Eastern gatekeeper caught me at it years ago. I went to prison, learned the error of my ways, handed over my passport—all the usual acts of contrition. I’m a model citizen.”

  “But all this stuff . . .”

  “My three daughters love to travel. They bring home otherworld souvenirs from time to time, and I try to find good homes for their knickknacks. It’s our family business. Silos and Daughters: purveyors of premium otherworld artifacts.” Mr. Silos gestured around the room. “As you can see, we’re very good at our work.”

  They must have been. All the gatekeepers were supposed to search travelers’ bags before letting them pass through the worldgates. My Gatekeeper had always been particularly diligent about this part of her job. She liked to boast that she had a nose for smuggled goods, and she’d certainly found a lot of them: Every month, I handed off a heavy sack of contraband to the courier who came by from Interworld Travel. But we’d never caught Rosemary or her sisters bringing any otherworld goods into Southeast illegally. I didn’t even remember meeting them at all. “How do you manage it?” I asked.

  Mr. Silos laughed. “That’s a family secret.” He tousled Rosemary’s curls. “I keep telling Rosie to stay home and out of trouble—she’s my youngest—but she’s stubborn. Aren’t you, Rosie?”

  Rosemary swatted his hand away and put her feet up on a crate. She was wearing real Northern military boots with gleaming steel toes; even if they were stolen, I couldn’t help admiring them. “You might as well get to the point,” she said, looking at me. “What do you want to know?”

  “What were you doing at the end of the world?” I asked. “You’re not Florence’s deputy.”

  “No,” Rosemary agreed. “I never said I was.”

  “You did! I’m sure of it!” I looked over at Arthur. “Didn’t she?”

  Rosemary sighed. “I didn’t say anything. When we met, Lucy, you assumed I must be the gatekeeper’s deputy, and I decided not to correct you. I figured you’d trust someone who worked for Interworld Travel.”

  I sank back into my seat. Was that how the conversation had gone? No wonder Rosemary had thought I was foolish. “Never mind that,” I said. “You still haven’t answered my question. What were you doing at Florence’s house? Were you sealing the worldgate?”

  “Of course not.” Rosemary started pulling off her boots. “Why would I want to do that?”

  I waited. The bees rumbled like far-off thunder.

  “Fine,” said Rosemary at last. “If you really want to know, I was supposed to go to South that day to pick up a shipment of flying carpets. People go wild for those things, especially in the worlds where they don’t have much other transportation, and I’d been in touch with a woman who said she could find me a few. When I got to the end of the world, though, the gatehouse was a mess, and Florence was gone. Her deputy was, too. I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried the door myself, but it wouldn’t budge. Then after a while, you showed up, so I caught a ride with you back to Centerbury and made my way home.”

  “You climbed through a washroom window!”

  “I’m a smuggler!” Rosemary said. “Just being in the lobby of Interworld Travel makes me itch. I had to get out of there.” She set her boots on the floor and pulled her knees up to her chest. “You probably think I’m awful, but I swear I’d never do anything to break the worldgates. We smugglers need them most of all! If they aren’t opened soon, Silos and Daughters will go out of business.”

  Mr. Silos nodded. “My oldest girl, Sarah, is trapped in North, and Tillie is stranded somewhere in East. As long as those doors stay shut, they can’t make it home. We’ve all been passing messages through the smugglers’ channels, but no one in any of the worlds knows what’s going on or who might be behind it all. That’s why I’m keen to talk to you.” He picked up a ball of something green and fuzzy from the floor—a fruit, maybe? an animal?—and tossed it into a crate behind him. “What’s the news from Interworld Travel? What’s Governor Bracknell doing to fix all this?”

  “I’m not sure.” I knew I’d promised to answer Mr. Silos’s questions, but that didn’t mean I was eager to do it. “Like I told you, we’re not travel officers.”

  “You must know something. You’ve been there for days.” Rosemary sounded impatient. “Or has Mrs. Bracknell just stuck you in a basement and forgotten about you?”

  Arthur glanced at me. “As a matter of fact—”

  “We’re working in the archives,” I said firmly. “The last worldgate just closed. That’s the one between Southeast and South. All the worlds are cut off from one another now. The travel officers think Henry Tallard might be responsible.”

  “The otherworld explorer?” Rosemary shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Lucy thought you might be his accomplice,” Arthur put in.

  This made Rosemary laugh. “Henry Tallard won’t even speak to smugglers. He cares too much about his reputation. I can’t believe he’d do anything to harm the worldgates.”

  “You should have seen him this morning, then,” said Arthur. “He ran into the lobby and started shouting at everyone. The travel officers dragged him off to the House of Governors.”

  At this, Mr. Silos raised his eyebrows again. “I’d like to hear more about that.”

  With occasional contributions from the bees, Arthur and I told Mr. Silos and Rosemary what we could remember. The more we talked, the more confused they looked.

  “And you’re sure he said gatecutters?” Mr. Silos asked. “He thought you had Arabella Tallard’s gatecutters here in East?”

  Arthur nodded. “I can’t understand it, either. Lucy told me they’re locked up in a museum somewhere.”

  “They were in a museum,” said Mr. Silos. “The Southern Museum of Magic and Industry. My parents took me on a trip to South when I was a boy, and I saw them myself.”

  “But they’re not there anymore?”

  “They were stolen.” Mr. Silos gave me a curious look. “Half a year ago. No one at Interworld Travel told you?”

  They hadn’t, of course. Maybe the Gatekeeper had been alerted, but she hadn’t passed the news along to me. “It never came up,” I said.

  “Then they kept the news quiet. I’m not surprised. None of the Interworld Travel commissions would want people to panic. The whole story blazed through the smugglers’ channels, of course. We’ve had people searching for the gatecutters for months, but no luck yet.”

  Rosemary looked up at her father. “Do you think the person who took them is the same person who closed the worldgates?”

  Mr. Silos hesitated. “It could be. If I wanted to separate all the worlds from one another, the first thing I’d do would be to steal the gatecutters. I wouldn’t want anyone else undoing my hard work.” He shrugged and put an arm around Rosemary. “All I know for sure is that if we don’t get those doors open again soon, I’ll go out of business, Sarah and Tillie won’t be able to get home, and we’ll all be in for eight worlds’ worth of trouble.”

  12

  Rosemary walked us as far as the main road. When we reached the intersection, she crossed her arms and stood there waiting, like she expecte
d us to say something. I didn’t know what it could be.

  “Um,” tried Arthur. “Thank you?”

  “Don’t come back to my pa’s house,” Rosemary said. “Leave us alone, and we’ll do the same for you. Get us in a jam, and . . . well, you heard what I said about the thistle-backed thrunt.” She pointed down the road. “Interworld Travel is that way. Don’t get lost.”

  “I’m sorry about your sisters,” I said, but Rosemary had already turned away.

  The rain had stopped, but the air was unusually cold and the clouds still hung low. As we walked back into Centerbury, it felt to me as if the city was holding its breath, as if someone had shoved a breakable vase too close to a table’s edge and everyone was waiting to see if it would topple and crash. People were gathered on the sidewalk to talk in low voices about the bakery that had run out of Northeastern flour, or about the medicines they badly needed from West, or about the eight Centerbury boys on a camping trip in Northwest whose parents were frantic with worry. A woman outside the library was asking for money to help her travel to both gatehouses and break the doors down herself. All the trains coming into the city were packed with people from the countryside who’d heard the ends of the world had been attacked and worried their villages might be in danger. They huddled together outside the train station, making clouds with their breath as they murmured the latest news: all eight worldgates closed, Henry Tallard taken away by travel officers, and no word from the House of Governors about what might happen next. As we passed the greenmarket, it began to snow. “The weather’s all flummoxed,” I heard one grocer call to another. “Clear skies at the ends of the world and spring snow in Centerbury! I don’t like it. The world-fabric’s not meant to be tampered with.”

  We’d been gone a lot longer than I’d hoped, but back at the Interworld Travel building, it seemed that no one had missed us. None of the travel officers even gave us a second look as we trudged up to the café for lunch and then back down to the basement. “What now?” said Arthur, closing the door to the archives behind us. “Do we go to Mrs. Bracknell and Thomas? Tell them we’ve found Rosemary?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I was reluctant to take a smuggler’s word as fact, but Rosemary had made a good point: She had no reason to want the worldgates closed, and every reason to want them open. “I think she told us the truth,” I said to Arthur, “or most of it, but it’s hard to trust someone who says she wants to feed you to a . . . a spiky-bottomed . . . what was it?”

  “A thistle-backed thrunt! I’ve been wondering about that, too.” Arthur wandered down the archive shelves and came back carrying a thick book. “Carnivorous Beasts Around the Worlds,” Arthur said, setting it down on the desk. “It was next to all those books about Henry Tallard.”

  I picked up the book and thumbed through it. The entry about thistle-backed thrunts was toward the end. “Found only in its native Western habitat,” I read, “this common pest can chew through almost any substance and travel as fast as an automobile. It has four rows of teeth, a powerful jaw, and an insatiable appetite. A double-edged Western defense ray can destroy a thistle-backed thrunt, and most Westerners carry one at all times for this very purpose. If an unprepared traveler stumbles across a thrunt, however, he will certainly be devoured.” I glanced at the illustration at the top of the page. “Honestly, Arthur, it looks kind of cute.”

  “Like a ball of fuzz with teeth?” Arthur asked. “And two beady eyes, and lots of spikes?”

  “Yes,” I said, “exactly.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Arthur, “because I think one is about to eat us.”

  The thrunt wasn’t any bigger than my fist, but it was hungry, and it was fast. It rolled across the floor of the archives, blocking our path to the door. I clambered onto the desk. “This isn’t West!” I said. “What’s that thing doing here?”

  The thrunt seemed to hear me. It paused for a moment. It munched the floorboards, making a noise like a chorus of saws. It blinked its small black eyes. Then it zoomed forward in a cloud of sawdust, heading straight for us.

  Arthur climbed onto the desk, too, and I stepped aside as well as I could to make room for him. “Speaking of double-edged Western defense rays,” he called over the din, “do you happen to have one?”

  “Of course not!” I shouted. The thrunt had sunk its teeth into the bottom of the desk and was starting to gnaw through the solid oak. At the rate it was going, we’d be dumped straight into its path in a matter of minutes. We couldn’t even send the bees for help; they’d flown up to the Travelers’ Wing to thaw out after the snowstorm. “What are we going to do?”

  “Maybe we can leap over the thrunt,” said Arthur uncertainly, “and get to the door before it notices we’re gone.” He bent his knees, ready to jump.

  “Wait!” I said. “We’ll try this first and see what happens.” I picked up Carnivorous Beasts Around the Worlds, held it in both hands, and heaved it toward the door.

  The book hit the floor with a thud. The thrunt looked around, surprised. In less than a second, it had rolled over to the book. In five seconds more, it was gnawing on the desk again, and the book was nothing but pulp.

  “Uh-oh,” said Arthur.

  The thrunt burped.

  The desk began rocking under our feet. Arthur wobbled, and I grabbed his arm. “Help!” we shouted over and over, but no one came. I threw a folding chair at the thrunt, but the chair only bounced off its spikes. When Arthur dropped a box of passport files on top of it, it shredded the papers and the box into confetti.

  “We’re doomed,” Arthur called to me. “That thing’s indestructible!”

  The battered old desk was tilting dangerously to one side now, and I had to brace my knees to keep from sliding to the floor. Arthur lay down on his stomach, grabbing the edge of the desk so tightly his knuckles went pale. One of his feet dangled a few inches above the thrunt’s mouth. There was no point in trying to escape; I couldn’t sprint half as quickly as the thrunt could move. What would it feel like, I thought in a panic, to be eaten from the toes up?

  The door to the archives flew open, and someone cursed. Then a beam of golden light shot out from the doorway, there was a loud sizzling noise, and the thistle-backed thrunt split neatly in two.

  I stared down at the halves of the thrunt. They lay steaming on the floor, filled with a thick orange sludge that had splattered everywhere. Arthur lifted his head and wiped the sludge from his glasses. “What just happened?” he said. “Is it dead? Am I dead?”

  “Not a bad shot, right?” said Rosemary from the doorway. She was dressed all in black, with her gleaming military boots on her feet and a bag slung across her chest. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  I jumped off the wreckage of the desk. “What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your lives, apparently.” Rosemary walked into the room, picked up the pieces of thrunt, and wrapped them gingerly in cloth. “You two were about ten seconds away from being lunch. Which, coincidentally, is what this will be tomorrow.” She tucked the cloth bundle into her bag. “Pa’s going to love it. He makes a really excellent thrunt soup.”

  “How did you kill it?” I asked.

  “Double-edged Western defense ray.” Rosemary dug a coin-sized metal disc out of her pocket and held it up for me to see. “If you’re going to spend any more time around thistle-backed thrunts, you should probably get one yourself.”

  “I’m not exactly planning on it,” I said, “but thanks. For saving us, I mean.”

  Rosemary shrugged and looked away. “It wasn’t any trouble.”

  “I’m confused,” said Arthur, sliding off the desk. “I thought you were the one who let the thrunt loose in here in the first place.”

  “Me?” Rosemary shook her head and started walking around the archive. “I said I’d have you eaten if you got me in a jam, and you haven’t. Have you?”

  Arthur and I both swore we hadn’t.

  “Then I don’t want you dead,” said Rosemary. “But I guess
someone else feels differently. Or do you generally have thrunt infestations in this building?”

  “I don’t think so.” I tried to clean the sludge from my arms but only ended up spreading it further. “The thrunt must have gotten here from West somehow. Could it have chewed its way between the worlds?”

  “The fabric of time and space,” said Rosemary, “is one of the few things a thrunt can’t eat through, luckily enough. Otherwise, it would all look like Swiss cheese by now.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s an Eastern thing,” Arthur murmured to me. “Lots of holes.”

  “My point,” said Rosemary, “is that the thrunt didn’t end up here by itself. Someone put it here. It’s a good thing I got here when I did. I would have showed up sooner, but I got turned around on the stairs somehow and ended up in a room with lots of fish tanks.” She picked up a box from the shelves and peered into it.

  “Wait a minute.” I took the box out of her hands. “You still haven’t told us why you came to Interworld Travel in the first place. Don’t you hate this place? Doesn’t it make you itch?”

  “Like crazy,” said Rosemary. “But I came to ask you a question. Are you sure the travel officers took Henry Tallard to the House of Governors this morning?”

  “Sure enough,” I said. As far as I knew, they’d marched him across the footbridge and down to the cells in the basement of the building. “That’s where the woman in charge said he was going.”

  “That’s strange,” said Rosemary, “because after you left our house, I went by the House of Governors myself. I’ve got a friend who works in maintenance there, and I thought she might get me in to see Tallard. If he really knows what’s happening to the worldgates, Pa and I want to hear about it. But when my friend went to look for Tallard, she said she couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in any of the cells, or anywhere else in the building.” Rosemary looked grim. “So I wanted to know: are you wrong, or are you lying?”

  Before I could think of anything to say to that, the door to the archives opened again, and Mrs. Bracknell came through it.