Ghost of Doors (City of Doors)

by Jennifer Paetsch

  Raphael gritted his teeth. "Considering that I'm trying to help you, you might want to be more civil," he said with a sneer born of a hate equal to Wolfgang’s disgust. There was a time when Raphael went by his given name, Bradley, a time when he couldn't sneer, when the thought would have been as detestable as asking him to kill his brother. But now the sneers came easily. Now the chasm between what he was and what he had become was irrevocably wide.

  "Funny, I don't feel helped," Wolfgang mocked him.

  "I know things that you would kill to know." Watching him move, hearing him speak made Wolfgang certain: The change in him was complete. He was a true monster. His glamour gave him the appearance of eternal youth, not the preserved corpse he had become. And the words he chose came from another mind, a sick and devious brain, not the one Wolfgang knew, the boy who would bring him peaches every day from the tree in the nearby park. "Raphael" had taken his friend and destroyed him and left this thing in his place. Everything about him was loathsome, untrustworthy. Wolfgang fought to restrain a shudder and failed.

  "Depends on who I would have to kill. If you meant killing you," Wolfgang retorted, "I might take you up on that."

  "You know, you're a wanted man. You should be keeping your head low before someone cuts it off. I should kill you right now, but I have too much respect for your father to do that," Raphael said.

  Wolfgang's heart stopped mid beat. Was it possible that Raphael knew something about what happened to his real father? Or was his choice of words just coincidental? He was often in his father's lab when Wolfgang was young, when he was still called Brad. Two kids playing together, hiding from the dangers of the city streets under Markus' watchful eye. But was that really Markus then? Who knows when the switch took place? Did Raphael know? Had he seen it and kept it to himself all these years? Had he noticed a change in his father that Wolfgang himself hadn't noticed? Still, it was impossible for Wolfgang to hide his surprise over the comment in a veil of aloofness—he was no monster. "My father?" he blurted out in shock. "What about my father?"

  "Word is you are looking for him," Raphael said. "And if you're not," he leaned in to whisper, "you should be."

  "My father is in his lab," Wolfgang said to test him. "Like always."

  Raphael looked around. That was not like him. Overconfident in the extreme, Raphael was always certain that whatever he chose to do was the absolute correct thing to do at the moment. But now he was checking for eavesdroppers, for spies. Second guessing himself. A bad sign. This was serious, and more dangerous than Wolfgang had at first thought. Raphael stepped in close, so close that Wolfgang could smell the blood and incense that seemed so attractive but was yet another lure to draw human flesh to his mouth. "The Farseeing Tower," Raphael whispered. "Something is there that you must see."

  "What, I'm supposed to go sightseeing when my father's life is at stake?"

  "Can't you take something seriously for once?"

  Wolfgang took offense. Who was the one who rushed into becoming a vampire the first chance he got? "Me? You're the one who always takes the easy way out."

  "And you're the one who's always running away." They stared at each other, each daring the other silently to be the first to attack with fists instead of words. But Wolfgang and was surprised when Raphael offered to show an emotion other than anger, petulance, or disgust. "I loved your father," Raphael told him, eyes wide with regret, his arms outstretched to clap helplessly at his sides. "He was like the father I never had."

  "And you betrayed him!" Wolfgang screamed. You betrayed me, he thought. But he couldn't say it out loud. He wouldn't give Raphael the satisfaction anymore. Those days were gone.

  "We both did," Raphael said.

  "NO." He was wrong, dead wrong. And Wolfgang wouldn't hear it. He almost wished he had turned like everyone wanted just so he could give Raphael the beat down he deserved. "I didn't tear out his heart like you did. I didn't take his love and throw it back in his face by becoming into a monster. I stayed by his side. I kept faith."

  "Fat lot of good it did him. Then why is he a monster now?" So, he knew. His dark eyes mocked Wolfgang with mirrors of himself, mirrors that reflected a weak and pitifully mortal human in a lethal world, a piece of steak on a meat hook in a den of lions. "You let him down more than I ever did, Wolfgang. You're his son. I'm just a foundling, an orphan he took under his wing. I'm not his blood. You are." Pushed beyond his limits, Wolfgang struck out as hard as he could at Raphael, remembering the days when he won almost every fight between them, both real and pretend, justified and not. Inhumanly fast, the vampire side-stepped the attack and held Wolfgang immobile with a one-handed grip to his arm. These days, Wolfgang was the loser every time. "I'm not here to fight you," Raphael explained. "Not today. I found you only to help a good man. One who deserves better sons than we both were."

  "That's too much to expect out of us," Wolfgang told him. Raphael let him go, and Wolfgang adjusted his hoodie to recover some lost pride. "Think about it. What could we have done back then? We were children."

  "Not anymore," Raphael replied. "The Farseeing Tower. Go."

  Chapter 17

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE city, in the middle of a strip of No Man’s Land, the Farseeing Tower rose up above the skyline, a silver ball on a tall spike like an eyeball on a thorn. He was almost afraid of it—afraid of what he would find there, afraid that this was true, that Raphael was right, but, most of all, afraid that his dad was suffering, torn from his body like an animal ripped in half by the gears of a machine he could not understand nor control. And when he finally reached the tower, when he finally found the door in, Wolfgang’s knuckles whitened, the blood draining from his limbs as he gripped it and swung it wide. A bright light hit him, unbelievably white, as if white was a thing you could touch or a sound you could hear and it came at him like a wall. Then he was inside, inside a dead silence through the noise of the whiteness, and the whiteness swallowed him up.

  "I know you," said a voice in his mind. He couldn't see anyone for long moments, but then, a shadow formed like smoke off a fire and it became thicker and took shape. A man stood before him, dark, featureless, surrounded by white. Suddenly, Wolfgang realized that the light came from him, from this man, and that the man himself was transparent, and that there was something dark behind him, something that Wolfgang could see through him.

  It looked like a field of stars in the night sky. It looked like the universe.

  Wolfgang summoned his courage. "Father?" he asked.

  The transparent man stopped coming closer. His halo shone bright, killing the stars. "I thought so," the voice in his mind said. "I thought I knew you."

  "Father," Wolfgang cried. Tears ran down his face too quickly to stop. "What happened to you?" He didn't know if he should go on, if he should explain anything about the body—his father's body—in the woods, about why he was there, about anything.

  "Something went wrong," came the reply. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."

  Wolfgang believed him. But what was supposed to happen didn't matter anymore. "What are you doing here?" Wolfgang thought he could almost make out a faint visage, but maybe it was just his eyes struggling to make sense of the darkness and the light. The way his father took so long to gather his thoughts gave Wolfgang the feeling that not many people stopped here to talk on their way to somewhere else.

  "This is my life," the essence of Markus Schäfer explained. "I am the door."

  "Who did this to you?" his son pleaded.

  "I did this to myself," the father explained. "I made the weapon. But I was put here by someone else." He paused and perhaps he was thinking, remembering. Did he really know what happened after all this time? Perhaps the years had taken his mind, as well. "SUN put me here."

  "Why?"

  "To open the door. To lock the door. I am the door, now. I am everywhere."

  "No, you can't..." Wolfgang argued, then stopped mid sentence. He thought of the old lady in the wood, in the No Man's Land. She had sai
d those words, too, and they hadn't made any sense to him then, either. "You can't be the door. That doesn't make sense. You can only be you."

  "The door has become alive through me. I live through it."

  "No, you have a body, Father. I've seen it. It gave me this." Wolfgang held out the Ausweis. The ghost moved as if it had come closer, but Wolfgang was losing his sense of perspective from this blinding light in the immenseness around him. "Some tiny part of you is still there."

  "I do not feel it anymore. All I feel is here, this door, this space. I can feel the universe through it. And I send people where they wish to go. They go through me."

  Then Wolfgang understood. He was the door, he could direct people to any place in the universe, wherever they wanted to go. The door was more than just magic because of him. The door had more than a function; it had a purpose. The door had a will, a mind. The door had a soul. Then that meant...

  It came to him in a rush, blowing through him so hard it almost knocked him over, if that could happen while floating in ether. The old lady in the No Man's Land. She was the door he had been searching for! She was the door back home. He wondered if his father had ever learned that at some point when he went looking for it, or if his widerganger knew that as escape lay tantalizingly out of reach, now that his soul had gone.

  "Would you like to go home?"

  Overcome with emotion, Wolfgang could not answer. He finally found his voice, and it sounded so timid and meek in the vast nothing. "Me?"

  "It is where you want to go, correct? The place where you were born."

  Here it was. The thing he had been searching for. It was finally his, after all these years of dreaming, he could finally go home to the world where he belonged. He could finally see it, touch it, have it, the real world where humans understood one another and worked together and all your loves and dreams didn't just fall to dust because they were never real. He could meet his real mother and tell her he loved her. But it came with a price. And that price was his father's blood on his hands. If he didn't save his father's soul, who would?

  "Father... This is about you, now. I can't. I can't go. I have to help you, to save you." Wolfgang had expected more of a reaction than the silence he was met with. "Are you in pain?" he asked.

  "Sometimes," Markus said. "Sometimes my thoughts are painful. My thoughts are all I have. I regret." Wolfgang thought that he could hear the pain in his words. "I regret."

  "I'm going to help you, Father. You can't stay here," Wolfgang said. "This is wrong. You don't deserve this. No matter what you did to get here. No one deserves this."

  "We don't always get what we deserve," his father said, and this time Wolfgang could hear definite sadness in the reply. "I am sorry, my son."

  "It's okay, dad," he promised, and meant it. "I'd do anything to get you out of here. And I will. You'll see."

  Wolfgang turned to go. There was nothing else to do here. His father's light at his back, he could see an immense form before him that he hadn't seen before, a woman's face in black silhouette outlined with stars, vast and beautiful. "Wh-what's that?" Wolfgang found himself stuttering. The door hung just above her, and she lay below it like a guardian, great and powerful like an ocean, in slumber. So beautiful that Wolfgang could not look away.

  "I thought you knew," his father said. "My wife."

  Wolfgang thought he was speaking figuratively. "But who is that?"

  "My wife," he said again. "Your step mother."

  It was unbelievable in its perverseness. This was more evidence that SUN had done this intentionally, trapping them both. Why would his father lie? "What? How?"

  "A fae is needed to make the bond." Then it was true. He meant Wolfgang's real step mother, just as Markus was his real father. So his stepmother was a fake, too. SUN had sealed his real father and his doppelganger’s real mother up in a door and replaced them both while Wolfgang was still a child. No wonder his stepmother had been so agreeable to taking a new husband—that wasn't his stepmother. SUN had replaced them both. "I think that any with the Gift will do, but I've never tested that." Though invisible, his father's eyes were on him. He could feel them. "Maybe someone else has." Of course. Someone else was continuing these experiments for SUN. That was only logical. SUN would never let such a successful experiment go to waste. Maybe the man who pretended to be his father. Wolfgang remembered how that door had turned red in his neighborhood, a lone door in the middle of the block. He had opened it to find only an eye staring back at him before it imploded. Was MOON doing the same experiment?

  He reached out what seemed an impossibly long way into the darkness and grasped the door, its handle cool to the touch, scintillating with the colors of the stars, his father's halo, and Wolfgang's own shadow as it slipped across its painted surface with his movement. "I'll make them pay for what they did. Don't worry, dad, you and mom will be free. I swear."

  “It’s not for lack of wanting that I am not free,” his father warned. “The way out is not so easy.”

  “What can I do? I won’t leave you like this.”

  “Your step mother sleeps. I can’t awaken her.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “If I cannot awaken her, then you must find the stone that holds my body and set it free, so that I may be free.” Wolfgang’s spine chilled, the realization that things have been going on behind his back in plain sight, unnoticed, for a long time—that the meaning had been there all the time, but he hadn’t seen it. Trust had blinded him. Trust that the world as he knew it was all there is. He must have looked uncertain, for his father continued to explain. “The stones in the city are not accidents, my son. The stones with faces.”

  His heart broke. His father thought he was teaching him but he held the real secret. How could he tell him what he knew? Markus had thought his body in a grave, when it wandered instead in perpetual night, doomed to hunt what it could never find. Wolfgang finally understood what he hunted: His other half. His soul.

  “I will find your body, father. I will bring it back to you.”

  Hiding his wet eyes in his sweat shirt sleeve, he slipped through the doorway, passed from one world to the next like the journey from light to dark, from life to death. The daylight on the other side of the door was like moonlight when compared to the glow from his father's soul. As his eyes adjusted, he had to admit his lack of surprise when he walked into the trap that had been so elegantly and obviously laid out for him. Trusting Raphael had been a big mistake. Yes, he was grateful to have finally found his real father, but he should not have so naive to think that it would come without a price.

  Chapter 18

  THE MIDDAY AIR HAD TURNED hot and dry. Wolfgang thought he might melt into a puddle on the sidewalk right then and there, as if magic were the only thing holding him together, and maybe it was. Trembling unconsciously, uncontrollably, he found it hard to reconcile what he had learned, as if his brain was rejecting not just the revelation about his father, but everything about him as a human being and who he was because it went against everything he believed. His mind had given up on the whole of it, satisfied that dwelling on it was only tearing him apart, and desperate for something, anything, completely different, an escape from any and all thoughts. It was all he could do to regulate his breathing, his cognizance shrinking until there was only the basics of life, mainly breathing, then standing upright, and finally, consciousness.

  When he saw Marie approach, he was at the same time grateful and concerned. Something didn't seem right, but he was too distraught to consider what. In Doors, that was a fatal mistake. "What's wrong?" he asked. The look on her face bordered anger, but hid some other emotion he could not place, having never seen it in her face before. She was alone, and that was not a good sign. "Where's Leonie?"

  Her knife whipped out in a flash. It was only because luck was on his side that Wolfgang dodged the blow, or perhaps because her anger ruined her aim. Armed with Vogelfang, he managed to deflect her weapon instead of being slit open, and the insta
nt that his halberd struck he realized that she wasn't Marie at all. Wolfgang saw himself crumple to the ground, his doppelganger on fire with a rage that kept him going in spite of the fierce rebuff, and he recovered much faster than any human could.

  "Where's Marie?" Wolfgang shouted. "Where's Leonie?" He held Vogelfang at the ready over his shoulder. "What did you do to her?"

  "Maybe you should see for yourself.” Was she already suffering the same fate as his father? Would he be able to stop it from happening to himself? Wolfgang knew he wouldn't be able to fight his twin one on one for long. Maybe he could distract him long enough to run for it. "Oh, no. I can see it in your eyes. You want to run. You're not getting away this time. Don’t even try."

  “Why do you want to kill me anyway?”

  The soul stealing weapon, drawn from a coat pocket, now faced him in his doppelganger’s hand. Wolfgang froze. "If I use this, how would anyone know I'm not you? With your soul, it would be the best of both worlds. I would own you, be you. I would always know that I had you right where I wanted you.”

  "And then what? You think things are so great being me?” Wolfgang spread his hands out wide. “Look around you. This city will eat you alive as soon as you serve your purpose. They won’t let you leave, either. You’re just a slave to MOON. Can't you see that they don't care about you?”

  “Who said I worked for MOON?”

  Wolfgang almost dropped Vogelfang. His mind reeled as the last puzzle piece fell into place. SUN had brought his twin to Doors. Since Wolfgang wouldn’t turn and wouldn’t work for them, they wanted him dead. And his twin apparently accepted their help because he had trusted whatever lies they told him, but the reality was that SUN was using both of them. “Well, guess what? Your real mother is trapped with my real father. So if it’s SUN you’re working for, they lied to you.” His doppelganger stopped his subtle pacing for a moment, his eyes narrowing in uncertainty. “You think you know all there is to know about this place? You just got here. And let me tell you, they only tell you what they want you to know. SUN is lying to you just like they lied to me.”