The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  We made our way around the lobby, opening all the doors we could find. Some of them led to washrooms or coatrooms, but none of them led to another world. On the second floor, we searched through the café without any luck and headed toward the Explorers’ Museum. Found that other world yet? Arthur asked as we walked. I’m telling Kip about my greatest fears. Death. Ghosts. Cats.

  “Cats?” I whispered to Rosemary.

  She shrugged. “People from East are strange.”

  Anyway, said Arthur, I think he’s getting bored. And maybe a little angry.

  We’re going as fast as we can, I typed. But we can’t possibly open every door in this building. And what if the door to another world was just outside Interworld Travel? What if it was across the street, in the House of Governors, or tucked away in a back alley behind some trash bins? We need more time, I told Arthur.

  All right. The green letters flickered skeptically. I’ll try.

  There wasn’t another world behind the museum door, or in any of the dusty exhibits. We gave up on the second floor and headed back to the spiral staircase.

  Halfway up the flight of stairs, I froze. The lights were on in the third-floor hallway—the hall where Mrs. Bracknell and her travel officers worked. We’d run past the landing on our way downstairs, hoping no one would see us, but this time I could hear voices nearby. Somewhere very close to us, two travel officers were laughing.

  “Wait,” I whispered to Rosemary. We crouched in the shadows.

  The travel officers were complaining about their job assignments. One of them, with a voice that rasped like a pepper grinder, had just gotten back from chasing Henry Tallard, and her boots had been ruined in the Great Southeastern Swamp. “How’s it been here?” she asked. “Any progress on the eighth floor?”

  “Not as much as Mrs. B would like,” the other officer said. “We’ve been quilting all week, but someone’s got to have wondered about that snowstorm. We’ll need to do more. And we still haven’t shored up the fabric on the other side of the doorways; I’m not sure it’s safe. . . .”

  Rosemary elbowed me hard, and I yelped.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth, but it was too late. The travel officers paused. “Did you hear something?” the one with the pepper-grinder voice asked. “Out in the hall?”

  A prickle of panic spread over my skin. I tried hard not to breathe. Rosemary buried her head in her hands.

  “Probably that otherworld farmer again,” the other officer said. “He’s always coming in and out at strange hours. Says he can’t get any rest in this building.”

  “I know what he means.” Both officers laughed again. Their voices faded away as they moved down the hall, away from us.

  “What was that about?” I hissed.

  “I was getting your attention!” Rosemary whispered. “The eighth floor! Did you hear what they said?”

  “Of course I heard it.” I blazed up the stairs ahead of her. “And I didn’t need any help from your elbow.”

  The way up to the eighth floor was still blocked off with plywood and tape, but we made a gap in the barricade and squeezed through it. The stairs beyond were covered in dust. Someone—or several someones, it was hard to tell—had made footprints up and down them. “I ran into Mrs. Bracknell coming down these stairs,” I whispered to Rosemary. “She said she’d been checking on the renovations.”

  The eighth floor really did seem to be under construction. It looked like a skeletal version of all the floors below it, as though someone had pulled away all the paint and plaster to reveal the truth of the building’s bones: wood and metal, boards and nails. Some of the walls were hung with huge quilts of shimmering fabric. A few more unfinished quilts were strewn across the floor, leaking their cotton batting. There were skylights in the ceiling, and through them we could see the stars.

  Rosemary pulled a flashlight out of her bag and cast the beam around the space. There didn’t seem to be much of anything in front of us, but on the floor, a trail of footprints in the dust led to the left. “This way,” I whispered, pointing.

  Are you there? said Arthur. Are you talking without me? You promised you wouldn’t talk without me.

  We followed the footprints and found ourselves in a long, empty corridor. Dust motes swirled like fireflies in Rosemary’s flashlight beam as she cast it from one end of the passageway to the other. We both sucked in our breath, and I forgot all about replying to Arthur: one whole side of the corridor was lined with doors.

  They weren’t regular wooden doors, either—not all of them, at least. It looked as though a carpenter had run out of materials and started scavenging doors from other people’s buildings. One was white, flanked by marble columns; one was black and perfectly smooth; one was painted a glossy red, with a brass knocker. As Rosemary passed the flashlight beam over each of them, I counted: there were seven doors in all. Two were blocked off with yellow construction tape. All seven were hung with padlocks.

  Hello? It was Arthur again. Lucy? Rosemary? Are you there? Are you safe? Where are you? What’s happening? Are you in danger? Do you need help? Do you need sandwiches?

  Hush! said Rosemary. We found something. Not sure what it is.

  I started walking down the corridor. I wasn’t sure what was down there, either, but I was determined to find out.

  15

  The first door I came to was built of unfinished boards and tacked together with shiny nail heads. It looked as though it belonged on the side of a barn. When I got up close, I could see that the padlock had three little numbered discs on its side: you needed a combination to open it.

  Or at least most people would have needed a combination. Rosemary, however, didn’t seem to think this was necessary. She pulled out her double-edged Western defense ray, aimed its golden light at the padlock, and—

  “Stop!” I grabbed her wrist. “Don’t do that!”

  “For worlds’ sake!” Rosemary fumbled the defense ray, nearly taking off her own fingertips in the process. “Watch out, Lucy! Do you want me to slice myself into pieces?”

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I just thought that . . . well, if you cut off the lock, whoever put it there in the first place will notice. They’ll know someone’s been sneaking around.”

  “All right,” said Rosemary, “but if I don’t cut it off, we won’t be able to open the door.”

  “Not necessarily.” I took the lock in my own hands. “Let me try.”

  I couldn’t see Rosemary rolling her eyes, but I felt sure that’s what she was doing. “We’re going to be here for hours,” she said under her breath. “Kip is finally going to run out of places to search for assassins, and Arthur will show up here with a tray of sandwiches, and—”

  The lock popped open in my hands. I grinned and handed it to Rosemary.

  “Lucy Eberslee.” She stared down at the lock, keeping it cupped in her palms like a jewel. “How in all the worlds did you do that?”

  While Rosemary had been complaining, I’d turned the dials on the lock until the combination matched the one I’d used back at the gatehouse to put important papers in the Gatekeeper’s special safe. It seemed like a great trick, but it wasn’t, really; practically anyone else in the building would have been able to do the same. “I’m an Interworld Travel employee,” I reminded Rosemary, “and Interworld Travel uses the same passcode for everything.”

  “They do?” Rosemary couldn’t help sounding curious. I felt sure this particular piece of information was going to make its way through the smugglers’ channels in no time at all. She looked down at the lock, but I’d learned a thing or two from the Gatekeeper, and I’d already turned all the dials back to zero. “What’s the passcode?”

  “I know you think I’m foolish,” I said, “but I’m not that foolish.”

  Rosemary groaned and handed the lock back to me. “Honestly, Lucy, are you still upset about that? I’ve already apologized for saying it.”

  I frowned at her. “You haven’t, actually.”

  “I s
aved you from the thistle-backed thrunt!”

  “Keeping someone from getting eaten,” I said, “is not the same as apologizing to them.”

  “It isn’t?” Rosemary looked genuinely baffled. “Well, then, I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “And thanks for vouching for me with Mrs. Bracknell. I’d have been in bad trouble if you hadn’t.”

  “You’re welcome.” I tugged at the handle of the barn door.

  Rosemary wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  I’d noticed it, too. As soon as I’d started to open the door, the air on the eighth floor had filled with the scent of fresh-cut grass, damp earth, and something more pungent, more fertile, something that could only be described as . . .

  “Cows,” said Rosemary.

  We stared through the doorway. The cows stared back at us.

  The barn door had opened into a wide green meadow under a sunny sky. The land was flat and it stretched for miles, but I could see forests in the distance, and beyond that, the hazy blue shadows of mountains. Here and there, buttercups sprang up. A cricket creaked in the grass nearby. Overall, it seemed like a pretty nice place to be a cow. There were at least twenty of them grazing in the meadow, and they didn’t look particularly happy to see us.

  Rosemary didn’t look happy, either. “Northeast,” she said, making a face. “Of all the worlds to find behind a secret door. It figures.” She shrugged and stepped through the doorway.

  Watching her go was like staring at an optical illusion: she was still so close I could have touched her, but she was walking into another world. I’d never been allowed to stand near the worldgate while the Gatekeeper helped travelers through it, but I’d always imagined the process to be a little more dramatic than walking into the next room. Even Arthur had made a grand entrance, more or less.

  “Are you coming?” Rosemary called back to me. She was standing in the grass on the other side of the door now. “I know it’s only Northeast, but it’s not the worst place in the worlds.”

  “All right.” I tried to ignore the twinge of guilt in my stomach. I hadn’t thought to bring my passport with me, and even if I’d been able to file all the necessary paperwork beforehand, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I was sneaking through an unauthorized worldgate in the dead of night. Still, when a door between the worlds opens up in front of you, you’d have to be crazy not to pass through it.

  Folds of shimmering material rustled under my feet as I walked through the doorway. Someone had tugged at the fabric of time and space, gathering it together and bundling it up to shorten the distance between the two worlds. Around the edges of the doorway, where the fabric had been cut, it was starting to fray; if the Gatekeeper had been there to see it, she would have taken out her maintenance kit on the spot. “Shoddy workmanship,” she would have said. “If we don’t take care of the fabric of time and space, it’ll be unraveling around our ears.” I stepped carefully, trying not to do any more damage.

  Then I came out into the sunlight and blinked.

  Now that I’d reached the other side of the worldgate, I realized why the cows looked so dubious. I’d expected the barn door to be attached to an actual barn, but when I turned around to look at the doorway I’d just passed through, all I saw was a dark rectangle, a gaping hole in the fabric between the worlds. If I shaded the sun from my eyes, I could still make out the dusty floor of the Interworld Travel hallway. I reached back to pull the door shut behind me, wondering what it would look like—a door standing all by itself in the middle of the meadow?—but Rosemary stuck out her foot to stop me. “Leave it open,” she said, “at least a little bit. We don’t want to get stuck here.”

  She had a point. The meadow was beautiful, a hundred times nicer than the bustle of Centerbury, but it was a strange place to build a door between the worlds. The only signs of human life were a big whitewashed farmhouse and a few outbuildings. I hoped they wouldn’t be wrecked by all the whirlwinds and hailstorms that were sure to be passing through.

  “Are you sure we’re in Northeast?” I asked Rosemary. “There are farms all over the worlds.”

  “Only three worlds have cattle, though. The cows in East and Southeast aren’t exactly geniuses, but these cows—they know things.” Rosemary bent over to look them in their deep brown eyes. “We’re in Northeast, aren’t we?” she asked.

  Some of the cows nodded. The others couldn’t be bothered.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if these cows know Huggins.”

  A few cows nodded again, as if they might.

  “That worldgate in the middle of your pasture. Has it been here long?”

  All the cows shook their heads vigorously. A few even mooed.

  “Do you know Mrs. Bracknell?” I asked. “Is she the one who opened it?”

  This time, the cows just stared at me. They were pleasant enough, I decided, but they weren’t half as useful as a horde of magical bees.

  “The bees!” I said, remembering. “Arthur!” We hadn’t sent him a message since we’d found the worldgate, and if my wildly flashing InterCom was any indication, he wasn’t happy about it.

  You found something? he’d written. Are you in another world right now? Is this thing working? Uh-oh. Lucy? I think you should come back. Kip is getting kind of mad. He says he isn’t paid to babysit royalty. He says he’s leaving. What should I do? I don’t think I can stop him. There he goes! He’s in the hallway now. He’s knocking on your door. He seems a little suspi

  That’s where the messages cut off.

  “Oh no.” I waved my InterCom at Rosemary. “There’s trouble. We’ve got to get back.”

  Kip was waiting for us in the Travelers’ Wing. He obviously wasn’t happy. Neither was Arthur, who was standing next to him and looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else. When he saw us running down the hall, though, his shoulders came down from his ears and he broke into a grin. “Here they are!” he said to Kip. “I told you there was nothing to worry about. They’re both completely fine.”

  “No thanks to you,” Kip told him. Then he turned his glare on us. “I’d like to know what you thought you were doing.”

  “We went dancing!” I’d thought of this as Rosemary and I had hustled down the stairs and dragged the construction barrier back into place behind us. “In Centerbury. We were bored, and we decided to sneak out. We’re very sorry. It was irresponsible of us.”

  “Yes.” Rosemary nodded solemnly. “We’re the worst.”

  “Dancing?” Kip looked at Arthur. “I thought you said they went out for pastries.”

  Arthur looked stricken. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s because we got our pastries first. Everyone knows you can’t dance until you’ve eaten some pastries.”

  “We thought of saving one for you,” Rosemary told Kip, “but then we didn’t.”

  This didn’t seem to make Kip feel any better. “Mrs. Bracknell isn’t going to be happy about this,” he said. “It’s lucky you both made it home safely.”

  Arthur was looking around overhead, as though he’d misplaced something in midair. “Ah, Lucy?” he said. “Are the bees still out dancing?”

  “The bees?” I shook my head. “The bees didn’t come with us. They’re here with you.”

  “No,” said Arthur, “they’re not. I thought you had them.”

  “And we thought you did!”

  “Maybe they went off somewhere on their own,” Rosemary suggested.

  “Without telling us? I don’t think they’d do that.” It was true that the bees didn’t like to ask for permission, but they were usually thoughtful enough to let me know what they were up to. “Did you see them go?” I asked Kip.

  He shrugged. “I’m supposed to keep an eye on you three. No one said anything about bees.”

  I pushed past him into Arthur’s room. The air should have been buzzing with the beat of hundreds of little wings, but the whole room was silent and still. I started to feel sick to my stomach. The closet
door was shut, so I tugged it open. At first I didn’t see anything except the few pieces of clothing we’d hung up neatly on hangers. Then I heard a thin, frantic hum.

  The floor of the closet was carpeted in bees. They were moving, but barely; some crawled listlessly toward my feet when they realized I was standing there, and others beat their wings, hovering in the air for a moment or two before falling back into the crowd. I wasn’t any sort of expert when it came to bees, but even I could tell that something was badly wrong.

  I knelt down and opened my hands. A few of the strongest bees dragged themselves onto my palms. “What’s happened to you?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

  The bees writhed a little. “They want to talk,” said Arthur in a low voice, “but they’re not strong enough.”

  “I think they’re trying.” Slowly, with enormous effort, the bees in my hands were shuffling into formation. Rosemary and Kip had followed us into the closet by now, and all four of us watched as the bees spelled out a word letter by letter:

  F-L-O-W-E-R-S.

  Arthur frowned. “You want us to bring you flowers?”

  All the bees quivered violently. They didn’t like that idea at all.

  “Maybe flowers are what made them sick,” I said. “Maybe they found a plant that’s harmful to bees, or maybe—”

  “Oh, worlds,” said Rosemary. “The vase!”

  “What vase?” I asked, but Rosemary was already gone. She’d run into my room, and when the rest of us followed her, I saw what she’d meant. There on the windowsill was the bunch of bedraggled purple flowers that had appeared in my room that afternoon, drooping in a vase made of green glass. On the sill around the flowers, more bodies of bees were scattered: at least ten, maybe twenty. They lay silent and still, and when Rosemary nudged them with a fingertip, they didn’t move.

  “Oh no,” said Arthur. He sat down on the bed, looking grim.

  “Who brought these flowers here?” I spun around to face Kip. He looked as alarmed as the rest of us. “Who put the vase in this room?”

  Kip stammered that he didn’t know anything about it. “It looks like an otherworld flower to me, Miss Eberslee,” he said, “but plants aren’t my specialty. I don’t know what you’d call it.”