The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  “She already tried to have us eaten,” Arthur volunteered. “And sent to the mountains.”

  Henry Tallard nodded. “I wonder if you would have returned from that trip.”

  All of us shuddered. I felt sure he was right. And then I realized it: strictly speaking, Mrs. Bracknell didn’t try to send us to the mountains. My brother, Thomas, did. Did he know she’d been trying to dispatch us? Was he helping her do it? Of course not, I thought; he couldn’t have known about her plans. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Thomas standing at the other end of the eighth-floor hallway, shouting at me not to go through the worldgate. We weren’t particularly close—he’d started his first job at Interworld Travel when I was only three—and I knew how loyal he was to his work. Would he do whatever he was told? Did he actually have a choice in the matter?

  “All this time,” Rosemary mused, “when Mrs. Bracknell said she was trying to keep us safe, she was actually keeping us captive. Waiting for the moment she could polish us off.”

  “Oh, don’t!” I said. It was too awful to think about. “We’re not polished off yet. There must be something we can do. Does Mrs. Bracknell still have the gatecutters?”

  “I assume so,” said Henry Tallard. “Once she’s done opening doors, she’ll probably hide them away somewhere to make sure no one else can open a door she hasn’t authorized. When I turned myself in to Interworld Travel, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of them—or even steal them myself if I could. But the gatecutters aren’t in her office, I’m sorry to say, and she’s not an easy woman to outrun. Did you know she dragged me through that worldgate into West herself?”

  “So you were never locked up in a cell in the House of Governors?” I asked.

  “Never,” said Tallard. “The travel officers took me straight to Mrs. Bracknell, and Mrs. Bracknell brought me straight here. Every officer in that building knows what the governor is up to. They’re helping her do it.”

  Including Thomas, of course. I shoved the thought aside. “We need to let the otherworld leaders know what Mrs. Bracknell is doing,” I said. “Her worldgates are still under construction. They’ll never let her finish them.”

  Arthur nodded. “Good thinking, Lucy.”

  But Henry Tallard didn’t look so impressed. “They won’t listen to you,” he said. “You or I could walk into the Western Interworld Travel branch right now and accuse Mrs. Bracknell of conspiracy, but it wouldn’t do any good. She may not be as well known as some of us”—here he gestured to himself, of course—“but she’s respected all around the worlds. Even worse, people actually seem to like her. If we didn’t bring evidence to support our case, they’d laugh us out the door. That’s where the favor I asked for comes in.”

  Right. The favor. I thought I could guess what it was. “You need us to steal the gatecutters?” I asked. “To use as evidence?”

  “Oh, no; that’s a hopeless task, too. Mrs. Bracknell probably keeps them strapped to her waist or tucked under her pillow. If I couldn’t retrieve them, you certainly can’t. And as I was saying, the other seven leaders of Interworld Travel might not care what a group of questionable children has to tell them—”

  “Questionable!” said Rosemary. “Ha!”

  “—but they’ll certainly listen to their own senior officers,” Tallard finished. “When they closed the doors between the worlds, Mrs. Bracknell and her team made sixteen gatekeepers disappear in the process. I’m sure at least a handful of those sixteen must remember what happened to them. If you can find those gatekeepers, and they share what they know about Mrs. Bracknell’s project, that should be enough to catch people’s attention.” He grinned at us. “I’d go looking for them myself, but I don’t think the guards outside would let me get very far. It’s appalling how little respect they have for famous explorers.”

  “About the missing gatekeepers,” I said. “You don’t think they’ve already been . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the question. If Mrs. Bracknell had harmed my own frizzy-haired, heavy-footed Gatekeeper, I didn’t want to think about it.

  But Henry Tallard only shrugged. “I don’t know what’s happened to them. If I were Mrs. Bracknell, I wouldn’t want to lose the knowledge that sixteen worldgate experts could give me, but who’s to say whether she’d feel the same? I only know that if they’re alive, someone really should find them. Don’t you agree?”

  Before any of us could answer, one of the white walls slid open.

  None of us had asked Michael to return, but there he was anyway. He’d changed out of his white jumpsuit into a standard-issue travel officer suit and tie, though his pants were an inch too long and his tie was an inch too short. Just behind him stood Mrs. Bracknell’s two guards, still holding their weapons. They looked grim, but guards always did, as though constant grimness was a requirement of the job. Michael, on the other hand, looked furious.

  “I’d never seen you three before,” he said, “so I called up your Interworld Travel personnel files. Lucy Eberslee, your employment was terminated last week. And as for the other two”—he glared at Arthur and Rosemary—“the system’s got no record of your faces. I haven’t had a chance to search the database of known otherworld criminals, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you both turned up there. What I know for sure is that none of you work for Mrs. Bracknell.”

  “I was terminated?” I said.

  “That’s better than blasted,” murmured Henry Tallard, “which is what you may be soon.”

  The guards grabbed the three of us by the shoulders and marched us up the stairs. They made me go first, so I couldn’t see Rosemary or Arthur behind me. “Close!” Michael snapped, and I heard the door in the wall slide shut, locking Henry Tallard on the other side of it.

  Even at a time like this, Arthur couldn’t help himself from making conversation. “I hope I’m not being too curious,” he said, “but where are you taking us?”

  Michael let out a long sigh, the kind people produce only when they’ve been having a very bad day. “To Mrs. Bracknell, of course,” he said. “She’ll be waiting for me at the worldgate by now, and I’m sure she’ll know what to do with you.”

  20

  None of us spoke much as the pod rolled us back the way we’d come. Michael’s gaze never wavered from the driving controls, and the rest of us literally couldn’t move: Mrs. Bracknell’s guards had strapped us into our seats with some sort of tough metal cord to make sure we couldn’t escape. I didn’t recognize the landscape around us, but when the morning sky began to crackle with jagged blue lightning, I could tell we must be getting closer to the worldgate. Birds were gathering overhead, bright-feathered ones with long, curved beaks and earsplitting cries. “They sound like ambulance sirens,” Arthur said, mostly to himself.

  “They’re yellow-winged wailers,” Rosemary told him. “There’ll be more on the way if the weather keeps up. They adore being zapped by lightning; I think it gives them a sort of rush. When Pa brought me to West for the first time, a whole flock of them chased us down the street during a storm, trying to haul us away and feed us to their young.” She looked a little wistful at the memory. “It was very exciting.”

  We rolled down a hill, past a stand of trees, and into a green clearing. In the damp, matted grass in front of us stood Mrs. Bracknell, looking a little damp and matted herself. She was yawning—it couldn’t have been daylight yet in Southeast—and checking her wristwatch. As the pod came to a stop, she looked up and gave Michael a tight smile. You’re late, she mouthed.

  Then she saw us, and the smile dropped straight off her face.

  I didn’t envy Michael one bit as he stepped out of the pod to explain the situation. I could only hear snatches of their conversation, mostly from Mrs. Bracknell—“What are they doing here?” and “You let them speak to him?” and “Extremely disappointed”—but it didn’t sound as though the news was going over particularly well.

  “I wouldn’t want to be him right now,” Rosemary said, tilting her head toward Michael. “She’s hopping mad.�
�

  “I wouldn’t want to be us,” said Arthur. “What do you think she’ll do to us?”

  “I’d rather not imagine it, thanks,” I said.

  Once Michael’s back was turned and Mrs. Bracknell was busy shouting at him, Rosemary started digging through her pockets. The guards had wrapped their metal cords around our waists, but they hadn’t bothered to secure our hands or arms. I’d overheard one of them asking the other how much damage the three of us could possibly manage to do. Now I could tell Rosemary was looking forward to answering their question.

  She found her double-edged defense ray and got to work cutting herself free from the cords. A strange metallic smell filled the pod. “Ah,” said Rosemary, breathing it in. “That’s much better.” She made a few strategic gashes in the side of the pod before aiming her defense ray at the cords around me. “Try not to breathe for a few seconds, Lucy. I’d rather not cut your ribs in half.”

  Once all of us were free, I looked toward Mrs. Bracknell. She’d finished reprimanding Michael, and now the two of them stood close together, talking in low, urgent tones. I knew there must be a worldgate just beyond them, but there was no door hovering in the clearing and no sign to indicate we were anywhere near the end of the world. No sign except for the yellow-winged wailers, that is: the lightning strikes were coming more quickly now, and so were they, screeching furiously enough that I couldn’t overhear what Mrs. Bracknell and Michael were saying. “Does anyone see the door?” I asked. “If Mrs. Bracknell just came through it, it can’t be far from here.”

  Arthur scanned the landscape and frowned. “Will it look the same on this side as it did at Interworld Travel?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “It was dark when we came through the first time. I suppose it could look like anything.”

  There was another flash of lightning. In the electric blue brightness, something caught my eye: a thin, dark line that grew up from the ground just behind Mrs. Bracknell’s left foot and traced a rectangular path through the grass and trees and sky, as though someone had cut a tidy piece out of the scenery and tried their best to stick it back into place. The rectangle looked just big enough for a person to pass through.

  “I see it,” I said. “I see the worldgate. It doesn’t look like anything, though. It looks like nothing.” I cinched up my rucksack. “Now all we’ve got to do is get through it.”

  Rosemary squinted, trying to make out the outline of the door. “And what do we do once we’re through?”

  “We go through another one of the doors on the eighth floor,” I said. “We do Henry Tallard’s favor. We find the Gatekeeper—and Florence, of course, and the others—and we help them stop Mrs. Bracknell from taking over the worlds.”

  I waited for Rosemary to say that she wasn’t interested in doing Henry Tallard any favors, that she’d run back to Silos and Daughters and leave the problems of Interworld Travel behind for good. Then I waited for Arthur to agree that although he’d be sad to miss the fun, he’d really better be getting home to East. Neither of them had known the Gatekeeper; neither of them was responsible for protecting the door at the end of the world. If they stayed out of sight for a while and kept their mouths shut, there was a chance Mrs. Bracknell would be willing to leave them alone. But I, for one, wasn’t interested in staying out of sight any longer.

  Then Rosemary nodded, and Arthur nodded, too. “Right,” said Rosemary. “It’s a good plan, Lucy. But I think I’m going to need that defense ray again.”

  We never really had a chance of making it through the worldgate unnoticed. Mrs. Bracknell was standing right in front of it, and when she saw us running out of the pod, she shook her head as though she’d been badly disappointed. “Honestly, Michael,” she said, “can’t you do anything right?”

  I would have liked to spend a minute or two enjoying the look on Michael’s face, but I didn’t have the time: Rosemary was brandishing her double-edged defense ray in Mrs. Bracknell’s direction, and Arthur was waving a long branch he’d picked up off the ground. I grabbed a branch of my own and started waving it, too. “Out of the way!” Arthur shouted. “We’re going through that door, and you’re not going to stop us!”

  Mrs. Bracknell pulled Michael out of the way and stepped in front of the worldgate herself. “You two look ridiculous,” she said to me and Arthur. “And you”—she scowled at Rosemary—“are going to get somebody killed. You’re swinging that ray so wildly, someone is bound to lose an earlobe or a bit of nose.”

  I walked forward, still holding my branch. Mrs. Bracknell was right: I did look ridiculous. “Let us through, please,” I said. I wasn’t sure what to do after that, though; this wasn’t the sort of situation I had much experience with. I was used to being the person guarding the worldgate, not the person trying to get through it.

  Now it was my turn to get a disappointed look from Mrs. Bracknell. “I expected better from you, Miss Eberslee,” she said. “What can you be thinking? This behavior is entirely inappropriate for a gatekeeper’s deputy.”

  “I’m not a gatekeeper’s deputy anymore, though,” I told her. Lightning crackled somewhere nearby, and the yellow-winged wailers howled. “You had me terminated, apparently.”

  “Did Michael tell you that?” Mrs. Bracknell sighed. “I’d meant to break the news myself, but you’ve seen how busy things have been around the office. I’m sorry, Miss Eberslee. You were a tolerable employee—until now, at least—but if the door at the end of the world is closed and there’s no gatekeeper to guard it, there’s certainly no need for a gatekeeper’s deputy.” There was another crackle of lightning, right above us this time, and her gaze flicked up to the sky. “Why don’t you all get back in the pod, and we’ll talk things through?”

  “Not a chance,” said Arthur. “You tried to have us eaten.”

  As the lightning faded away, the yellow-winged wailers rushed over. Rosemary had been right about them: there were at least fifty by now, and more kept flapping in from the treetops. They circled overhead, calling to each other. With each call, Mrs. Bracknell looked more concerned. “You really should put the weapon away, at the very least,” she said to Rosemary. “It’s the birds—”

  But the birds didn’t give her time to explain. They’d spotted the double-edged Western defense ray, and its golden beam must have been even more thrilling than lightning, because they plunged into a nosedive, wailing so loudly that I couldn’t hear the rest of whatever Mrs. Bracknell had to say.

  They were bigger than I’d realized from the ground, the tips of their beaks were sharper than I wanted to think about, and they smelled awful, like a pan left too long on a hot stovetop. The first one to reach us dove straight into Rosemary, knocking her down. She swung her defense ray at the bird, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all; he just wailed more loudly than ever. “This isn’t good!” Arthur shouted over the noise. “They’re going to feed us to their young!”

  I pushed through the flock to Rosemary and pulled her to her feet. The birds were all around us now, raking their claws through Michael’s hair and chasing Mrs. Bracknell across the grass as she ran toward the pod. I went in the opposite direction, toward the worldgate. Arthur had managed to fling it open somehow, and it looked like a gaping black mouth ready to swallow us whole. Better than being swallowed by a yellow-winged wailer, I thought as the three of us ran through it.

  21

  We ran straight into Thomas.

  “Lucy!” he said. I wondered how long he’d been waiting there in the eighth-floor hallway. “Thank the worlds you’re back. I’m sure you’ve got hundreds of questions, but if you’ll come with me—”

  We pushed right past him. Arthur and I had dropped our branches back in West, but Rosemary still had her defense ray drawn, and that was enough to keep Thomas a safe distance away from us as I fiddled with the lock on the next worldgate over, the one with marble columns. The door swung open, and a warm, salty breeze filled the hallway.

  “I know what you’re doing for Mrs. Br
acknell,” I told Thomas. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “If you’ll only—” Thomas said, but I’d already gone through the worldgate by then, and I couldn’t be bothered to hear the rest.

  22

  If I’d taken another step forward, I would have been soaked. We were standing at the end of a long pier reaching out into the sea, with massive waves breaking around the piles below us and the sun beating down from above. On this side of the worldgate, the door back to Southeast was just a thin black outline against the horizon, with nothing except the roaring sea to suggest that an entrance to another world was nearby. Mrs. Bracknell must have wanted to keep her worldgates secret until the time was ripe, because she’d chosen a lonely place for this door, too. In the distance, I could see ships and a bustling shoreline, and a few people were taking in the air farther down the pier, but I didn’t think any of them had noticed us hurrying out of the sky and into their world.

  “Where do you think we are?” I asked Rosemary over the rush of waves. “North?”

  She nodded, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked around. “Better than West, at least,” she said, starting to march down the pier as if she owned it. “We might get blown up or sunk, but I don’t think anything here will try to eat us.”

  Arthur and I hurried after her. “How do you know it’s North?” Arthur asked once we’d finally caught up. “Don’t other worlds have seas in them, and piers? Mine’s got both. Couldn’t we be in East?”

  Out on the water, there was an echoing boom. Flames and smoke rose up from a ship far in the distance, and people on the shoreline began to cheer.