“I think so,” I said. “A man and a woman, right?” They’d gone to East on business only an hour or so before the Gatekeeper had left, and I’d stamped their government passports without a second thought.
“That’s right,” said the Gatekeeper. “The man met me on the other side of the door. At first I thought he’d come to help us work on the worldgate, but then he grabbed me by the elbows and marched me out of the building like I was some sort of lawbreaker.” The Gatekeeper scowled. “He had one of these Eastern traveling contraptions parked nearby, and he had me get inside. That’s where they’d stashed Bernard, too. He was a sorry sight.”
“They’d hurt him?” I asked.
“Oh, no. Bernard is always a sorry sight. His clothes are all too large or too small, and nothing matches; he claims all the laundry gets jumbled up at the end of the world. Anyway, there sat Bernard, looking half an inch from death, along with the other travel officer. She wasn’t looking well, either. From what I could gather, she was supposed to go back into the library to stick the door shut, but she’d lost the tube of glue somewhere along the way.”
“I’m sorry,” said Arthur, “but do you mean it’s possible to seal a worldgate shut with glue?”
“Oh, not just any glue,” said the Gatekeeper. “Most of them won’t do the trick. But Southern repair-all glue will keep a door closed for good if you dab it on the latch or squirt it around the frame.”
“Of course.” Rosemary shook her head. “I should have thought of that myself. Southern repair-all glue sticks to anything. My pa says he knows a man who used it to fix a broken teacup thirty years ago, and the man’s still walking around with a teacup stuck to his hand.”
The Gatekeeper nodded. “It’s dangerous stuff. But the officers’ tube had gone missing at the end of the world, and they were all in a tizzy about it. Bernard and I had to stay locked in that awful car all night while they searched the grounds. The man kept shouting about how they were already late, they’d gotten the gatekeepers, anyway, and if they didn’t leave soon they’d be in trouble with her.”
“He must have meant Mrs. Bracknell.” I wondered what she’d told her travel officers to scare them all so badly. If any of them disapproved of her plans, they certainly hadn’t shown it.
“Now, Bernard and I didn’t know where we were being taken,” the Gatekeeper said, “but we were sure we didn’t want to go wherever it was, and being locked in the car gave us a chance to plot. When the officers came back and unlocked the doors, Bernard would create a distraction and I’d climb out. I was supposed to go back to Southeast for help if I could, and if I couldn’t, I’d go to the Eastern branch of Interworld Travel to sound the alarm. That’s more or less what happened, too. They found that awful glue at last, but when they came back to us, Bernard shouted something about poisonous spiders in the car, and I gave the travel officers a few good whacks with my cane on my way out the door. Then I hid in the library stacks. The officers came looking for me, of course, and they got close once or twice, but once they’d sealed the worldgate, I don’t think their hearts were in it. By the time I crawled out of hiding, the door at the end of the world was closed, the car was gone, and I realized Bernard hadn’t given me a single cent of Eastern money.” Her eyes closed again. “The Interworld Travel office is on another continent. I thought at first that I could swim there, but do you know how big this ridiculous world is? And almost three-quarters of it is water! I can’t imagine what Easterners do with it all.”
The Gatekeeper looked as though she might fall asleep at any moment, and after hearing what she’d been through, I couldn’t blame her. “And you don’t know what’s happened to Bernard?” I asked. “Do you think he’s still somewhere in East?”
“I’ve got no idea,” said the Gatekeeper. “All I’ve been doing is trying to get home and waiting for those travel officers to come back and grab me. They must have been too frightened to tell Mrs. Bracknell they’d lost me, or she would have come to get me herself by now. I imagine she’ll be here soon enough.”
The bees roused themselves from the Gatekeeper’s lap. NOT IF WE STOP HER FIRST.
The Gatekeeper opened one eye to give them a skeptical look. “And how do you suggest we do that?”
I’d been thinking about it, and I didn’t see why we had to give up on the task Henry Tallard had set for us in the first place. True, we’d only found one of the missing gatekeepers, but surely one would be enough. “We go to the Interworld Travel office here on East,” I said, “and we tell them everything we know about Mrs. Bracknell and the doors at the end of the world, and the whole problem will be out of our hands. Henry Tallard said no one at Interworld Travel would listen to us, but they’ll listen to you, won’t they?”
“They’d better,” the Gatekeeper muttered. “But I don’t see how we’re going to get there. Didn’t you hear what I said about the water? Even if we can find a way to pay our fare on a ship, it will take us days to cross the sea, and days to cross back.”
I looked over at Arthur. “Is she right about that?”
“There is a lot of water here on East,” he admitted. Then he smiled. “But we princes have ways of getting around it.”
28
“I don’t like this at all,” the Gatekeeper said. “Do I look like a bird to you, young man? Should I be in the air?” She didn’t give Arthur any time to answer. “No! Of course I shouldn’t! It’s extremely unsafe. Is this how people behave in East these days? Swooping through the clouds without any regard for gravity?”
After a warm meal, a hot bath, and the best night’s sleep I’d had in weeks, I’d woken up in one of the palace guest rooms that morning and found Arthur outside the door. His father, the king, was out of the country, Arthur had said, but he’d left behind the royal airplane. “And I’m sure he won’t mind if we fly it to Interworld Travel,” Arthur had told me as I’d yawned at him. “We’ll be there and back so quickly, he probably won’t even know we’ve used it.”
I’d rubbed my eyes. “Did you say fly?”
The flying contraption turned out to be even noisier than Eastern cars, and much larger, too, with the insignia of Arthur’s family painted on its flanks. At least Arthur wasn’t the one in charge of flying it. The king’s pilot sat at the front of the airplane, directing it through the sky and chatting with the sentries Arthur had convinced to join us. The Gatekeeper didn’t like this, either. “How can they joke at a time like this?” she asked as the pilot chuckled at something a sentry had said. “There should be absolutely no laughter allowed until everyone’s feet are back on the ground.”
“They have flying machines in South, too,” Rosemary said from across the airplane, looking up from her InterCom. “I’ve always wanted to zip around in one.”
“I haven’t.” The Gatekeeper crossed her arms. “In any case, those Southern machines run on magic. What’s keeping this one in the air? Nothing but metal bolts and hope, that’s what!”
I squeezed the Gatekeeper’s hand and left her to fret while I went to talk to Rosemary. “Any news from your pa?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not much. He says there’s an announcement planned in the lobby of Interworld Travel tomorrow evening. The governors are asking everyone in Centerbury to come. He didn’t want to set foot in the place, but I told him he’d better go anyway.” She flicked a switch on the InterCom and set it aside. “If Mrs. Bracknell has something to tell the whole world, I’d like to know what it is.”
The airplane had to land to refuel more than once, bumping and rumbling its way to a stop each time while the Gatekeeper groused. Eventually, we all filed off the plane and into a massive, crowded building where the Eastern travel officers who checked our documents didn’t know quite what to make of our otherworld passports. (“You’d think they’d never seen one before!” the Gatekeeper said in horror.) Once they realized that Arthur was a prince, though, they were only too eager to let the rest of us through. The sentries had gotten a car for us, and the Gatekeeper passed
them a little black book from the folds of her cloak. The page she’d turned to was full of addresses. She tapped her finger on the one for Interworld Travel, Eastern Division, and the sentry at the wheel nodded.
The road we followed was wide and flat, with low buildings planted on both sides and taller ones on the horizon. Beyond that were snow-peaked mountains much higher and grander than anything I’d seen in Southeast. I couldn’t see a duck pond or sheep meadow anywhere. “Where did you say we were again?” I asked the Gatekeeper.
She squinted at the page of addresses. “Colorado,” she said, “in someplace called America.”
Arthur looked out the window at the strange landscape as we rolled through it. “It doesn’t seem like a natural place to put an Interworld Travel office.”
“No,” the Gatekeeper agreed, “but it’s precisely halfway between East’s two worldgates. Equally inconvenient for everyone, I suppose. It’s their own fault their world is so enormous.”
When the car came to a stop, I didn’t realize at first that we’d arrived. We’d left the main road and were in a city now, on a busy street lined with golden-leafed trees. “Here we are,” said the driver to the Gatekeeper. “This is the address you requested.” He pointed to a squat one-story building in front of us. It had a faded blue awning and wide glass windows where someone had posted worn-out pictures of landscapes: a sun-bleached sandy beach, a forest that might have been green, some gently rolling hills a little torn at the corners. A piece of paper taped to the door read, simply, Eastern Travel Service, and a little red sign just underneath it cheered, We’re Open!
“It’s not much like our Interworld Travel building, is it?” said Rosemary.
Even the Gatekeeper looked uncertain. “You’re sure this is the place?” she asked the sentries. They said they were positive, though, so we gathered our bags and went inside.
I’m not sure the Eastern branch of Interworld Travel had ever seen so much activity. A middle-aged man in a blue sweater sat behind a desk reading a magazine, and when the little bell on the door handle jangled, he looked so startled that he almost fell off his chair. His eyes darted over us: a Gatekeeper, a smuggler, a prince, two royal sentries, a passel of bees, and a former gatekeeper’s deputy (currently unemployed). It was a wonder all of us fit in the room.
“Good morning?” said the man, as though he wasn’t quite sure it was. “May I help you? Is your group . . . planning a trip?” He pushed his magazine aside and started fiddling with a stack of brochures just as faded as the pictures in the window. “You might be interested in our special fare to Beijing.”
The Gatekeeper stomped to the front of the group. “We need to speak to whoever is in charge here. I oversee one of the Southeastern worldgates, and I have extremely urgent information about a plot against your world and others.”
This captured the man’s interest enough that he put down his brochures. “We don’t do much otherworld business these days, but whatever there is, I’m in charge of it. Claude Wilson, head of Interworld Travel.” He stood up and held his hand out to the Gatekeeper, who shook it. “And you are?”
“Alarmed,” the Gatekeeper said. She looked around the office. “Where is your staff?”
“At home.” Mr. Wilson shrugged. “It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, ma’am.”
Weekends had never been of much interest to the Gatekeeper. “Well, call them in, then!” she said. “The worlds are in crisis!”
Mr. Wilson came out from behind his desk, giving the Gatekeeper’s cane a wide berth. “If you’ve come to tell me the worldgates are shut,” he said, “you don’t need to bother; I’m already aware of that. The field team in Auckland called to tell me the news as soon as it happened. We’re short-staffed at our worldgate in the kingdom of Mellora, unfortunately, and I haven’t been able to reach Bernard, but I’m sending an officer there next week to look into things at that end of the world.”
TOO LATE! said the bees.
Mr. Wilson backed away from them. “As you can see,” he said, “the Eastern bureau is small.” He gestured to the office around him—a floral-patterned sofa, a coffee maker, a bulletin board on the plain white wall. “We’re not equipped to solve problems like this. When complications with the worldgates crop up, we prefer to let our otherworld neighbors address them. I agree the situation is concerning, but unless you’ve got a pair of gatecutters with you, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do. I’m very sorry to disappoint you.”
I recognized that pinch of irritation in his voice, the one that hinted he’d really prefer it if we all left him in peace to finish his magazine. I’d sometimes hinted that myself, back at the end of the world, but now I wished I hadn’t. “What would you say,” I asked him, “if we told you that the Southeastern Interworld Travel Commission is responsible for shutting all the worldgates and kidnapping the gatekeepers? And that they’re opening new worldgates themselves, all so Southeast can control everything and everyone that passes from one world to another?”
“I’d say that sounds extremely unlikely,” Mr. Wilson said. “Isn’t Clara Bracknell in charge of Southeast? She’s a respectable person.” He gave me a long look. “And who did you say you were?”
I hadn’t mentioned that yet. “I’m Lucy,” I said carefully.
“You’re not a gatekeeper, are you?”
“She’s not,” the Gatekeeper said, “but I am, and I trust Lucy implicitly.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “If you care about this world of yours at all, you should trust her, too.”
Mr. Wilson didn’t say anything. He picked up a white ceramic mug from his desk, walked across the waiting room, and filled it with coffee. Then he sat down on the sofa and drank the whole mugful in one long gulp.
“All right,” he said at last. “You’d better tell me more.”
29
Mr. Wilson’s staff turned out to be a group of five youngish men, all wearing short-sleeved black shirts, and all named Dave. After he’d listened to the Gatekeeper’s accounting of events, Mr. Wilson called the Daves in to work and switched on an Eastern computing machine, which whirred and beeped so furiously that I wondered if it might explode. I wasn’t the only one worrying, either. “I keep telling Claude that old clunker is gonna blow any day now,” one of the Daves told us, “but Claude doesn’t care. He’s not really a computer guy.”
With all of us looking over his shoulder, Mr. Wilson tapped at a few keys on the computer, and an image flickered onto the screen: a map of the eight worlds, a two-dimensional version of the sculpture we’d seen back in Southeast. The circles hadn’t moved from their usual positions, but the familiar lines connecting them weren’t there any longer. “That’s how it looked when I logged in last week,” said a Dave. “No gates open anywhere.” He leaned in for a closer look. “No, wait. That’s different.” He pointed at the pattern of thin lines crossing the space at the center of all the worlds. “Either your screen’s got some cracks, Claude, or someone’s cut at least five new gates through the world-fabric.”
“Whoa,” said the other Daves.
One of them nudged Mr. Wilson aside and pressed a few more keys. The image on the screen grew bigger. All the Daves stared at it. “Look at that,” a Dave said, jabbing his finger at one of the lines. “And that, near Southeast. Oh man, that one’s bad.”
I leaned closer. I had to squint to see what he was pointing at: a series of faint, irregular squiggles branching off from the lines representing the worldgates. One of them, coming from the place where Mrs. Bracknell had built her doorway to North, was growing larger even as we watched, inching its way across the screen. “That’s the place where Kip said threads were coming loose,” I told Rosemary and Arthur.
All the Daves wore identical expressions of worry. “It looks to me like these gates are starting to unravel,” one of them said. “What do you think, Claude?”
“I think I’d like to hear Mrs. Bracknell explain exactly what’s going on in Southeast.” Mr. Wilson stood up from his chair. �
��And I’m sure my colleagues in other worlds would like to hear the same before the fabric of space and time disintegrates and all of us go with it.” He pressed a button on the computer, and the screen went black. “Book us all seats on the next flight to Mellora, please, Dave.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, “don’t worry about that. We brought our own plane.”
Word was spreading fast about Mrs. Bracknell’s upcoming announcement, Rosemary told us on the trip back to the end of the world. “Pa has been talking to some of his friends in South,” she said. “They asked him if it was true that someone in Southeast has a plan to save the worlds. Pa tried to tell them Mrs. Bracknell wasn’t opening worldgates out of the kindness of her heart, but all his friends wanted to talk about was his no-good daughter who sealed the worldgates in the first place. So I guess word has been spreading fast about that, too.”
“We’ll set the record straight,” Arthur promised her. “By this time tomorrow, the only crimes you’ll be suspected of are the ones you actually committed.”
Rosemary smiled and closed her eyes. “That’s a nice thought.”
The Gatekeeper wasn’t any happier about being up in the air than she had been before, but when I sat down next to her, she reached out and patted my hand. “I’m glad you came to find me, Lucy,” she said, pulling her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “It’s exactly what a deputy should do in a crisis.”
“Former deputy,” I reminded her.
The Gatekeeper snorted. “We’ll see about that. I have a few things I’d like to say to Mrs. Bracknell the next time I see her, and none of them are very nice.”
By the time we got back to Arthur’s kingdom, we were all bleary-eyed and stiff. I hadn’t gotten much sleep as the airplane zoomed through the sky, and all I’d had to eat that day were the little packets of crackers and nuts one of the Daves had found stashed in a storage bin. At least everything at the end of the world was quiet. There weren’t any angry travel officers protesting outside the palace fence or lying in wait for us as we made our way back down the dirt-paved lane, retracing our steps back to Southeast. Just like the worldgates we’d seen in West and North, the door at the end of the world was almost invisible. If I hadn’t passed through it myself, I’d have mistaken it for a few irregular cracks in the high stone wall. But it was snowing in two-minute spurts in the lane, followed each time by a brief, blistering heat wave, so we knew we’d come to the right place.
The Door at the End of the World Page 17
