The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  But Samuel wasn’t with me that day in the field. So I pulled out my little pocket diary and wrote a story instead.

  When I was seven, that diary was the most precious thing I had ever owned, although whether I technically owned it is legally questionable. I hadn’t bought it, and no one had given it to me—I’d found it. I was playing in the Pharaoh Room just before I turned seven, opening and closing all the urns and trying on the jewelry, and I happened to open a pretty blue treasure chest (Box with vaulted lid, decorated with ivory, ebony, blue faience, Egypt; originally matched pair). And in the bottom of the chest was this diary: leather the color of burnt butter, creamy cotton pages as blank and inviting as fresh snow.

  It seemed likely that Mr. Locke had left it for me to find, a secret gift he was too gruff to give directly, so I took it without hesitation. I wrote in it whenever I was lonely or lost-feeling, or when my father was away and Mr. Locke was busy and the nursemaid was being horrible. I wrote a lot.

  Mostly I wrote stories like the ones I read in Samuel’s copies of The Argosy, about brave little boys with blond hair and names like Jack or Dick or Buddy. I spent a lot of time thinking of bloodcurdling titles and copying them out with extra-swirly lines (“The Mystery of the Skeleton Key”; “The Golden Dagger Society”; “The Flying Orphan Girl”), and no time at all worrying about plot. That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn’t lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough.

  Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door. It was a magic Door that’s why it has a capital D. She opened the Door.

  For a single second—a stretched-out slice of time that began on the sinuous curve of the S and ended when my pencil made its final swirl around the period—I believed it. Not in the half-pretending way that children believe in Santa Claus or fairies, but in the marrow-deep way you believe in gravity or rain.

  Something in the world shifted. I know that’s a shit description, pardon my unladylike language, but I don’t know how else to say it. It was like an earthquake that didn’t disturb a single blade of grass, an eclipse that didn’t cast a single shadow, a vast but invisible change. A sudden breeze plucked the edge of the diary. It smelled of salt and warm stone and a dozen faraway scents that did not belong in a scrubby field beside the Mississippi.

  I tucked my diary back in my skirts and stood. My legs shivered beneath me like birch trees in the wind, shaking with exhaustion, but I ignored them because the Door seemed to be murmuring in a soft, clattering language made of wood rot and peeling paint. I reached toward it again, hesitated, and then—

  I opened the Door, and stepped through.

  I wasn’t anywhere at all. An echoing in-betweenness pressed against my eardrums, as if I’d swum to the bottom of a vast lake. My reaching hand disappeared into the emptiness; my boot swung in an arc that never ended.

  I call that in-between place the threshold now (Threshold, the line of the T splitting two empty spaces). Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.

  My foot landed on the other side of the door. The cedar and sunlight smell was replaced by a coppery taste in my mouth. I opened my eyes.

  It was a world made of salt water and stone. I stood on a high bluff surrounded on all sides by an endless silver sea. Far below me, cupped by the curving shore of the island like a pebble in a palm, was a city.

  At least, I supposed it was a city. It didn’t have any of the usual trappings of one: no streetcars hummed and buzzed through it, and no haze of coal smoke curtained above it. Instead, there were whitewashed stone buildings arranged in artful spirals, dotted with open windows like black eyes. A few towers raised their heads above the crowd and the masts of small ships made a tiny forest along the coast.

  I was crying again. Without theater or flair, just—crying, as if there were something I badly wanted and couldn’t have. As my father did sometimes when he thought he was alone.

  “January! January!” My name sounded like it was coming from a cheap gramophone several miles away, but I recognized Mr. Locke’s voice echoing after me through the doorway. I didn’t know how he’d found me, but I knew I was in trouble.

  Oh, I can’t tell you how much I didn’t want to go back. How the sea smelled so full of promise, how the coiling streets in the city below seemed to make a kind of script. If it hadn’t been Mr. Locke calling me—the man who let me ride in fancy train cars and bought me nice linen dresses, the man who patted my arm when my father disappointed me and left pocket diaries for me to find—I might have stayed.

  But I turned back to the Door. It looked different on this side, a tumbled-down arch of weathered basalt, without even the dignity of wooden planks to serve as a door. A gray curtain fluttered in the opening instead. I drew it aside.

  Just before I stepped back through the arch, a glint of silver shimmered at my feet: a round coin lay half-buried in the soil, stamped with several words in a foreign language and the profile of a crowned woman. It felt warm in my palm. I slipped it into my dress pocket.

  This time the threshold passed over me like the brief shadow of a bird’s wing. The dry smell of grass and sun returned.

  “Janua—oh, there you are.” Mr. Locke stood in his shirtsleeves and vest, huffing a little, his mustache bristling like the tail of a recently offended cat. “Where were you? Been out here shouting myself hoarse, had to interrupt my meeting with Alexander—what’s this?” He was staring at the blue-flecked Door, his face gone slack.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  His eyes snapped away from the Door and onto me, ice-sharp. “January. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  I should’ve lied. It would have saved so much heartache. But you have to understand: when Mr. Locke looks at you in this particular way of his, with his moon-pale eyes, you mostly end up doing what he wants you to. I suspect it’s the reason W. C. Locke & Co. is so profitable.

  I swallowed. “I—I was just playing and I went through this door, see, and it leads to someplace else. There was a white city by the sea.” If I’d been older, I might’ve said: It smelled of salt and age and adventure. It smelled like another world, and I want to return right this minute and walk those strange streets. Instead, I added articulately, “I liked it.”

  “Tell the truth.” His eyes pressed me flat.

  “I am, I swear!”

  He stared for another long moment. I watched the muscles of his jaw roll and unroll. “And where did this door come from? Did you—did you build it? Stick it together out of this rubbish?” He gestured and I noticed the overgrown pile of rotted lumber behind the Door, the scattered bones of a house.

  “No, sir. I just found it. And wrote a story about it.”

  “A story?” I could see him stumbling over each unlikely twist in our conversation and hating it; he liked to be in control of any given exchange.

  I fumbled for my pocket diary and pressed it into his hands. “Look right there, see? I wrote a little story, and then the door was, was sort of open. It’s true, I swear it’s true.”

  His eyes flicked over the page many more times than was necessary to read a three-sentence story. Then he removed a cigar stub from his coat pocket and struck a match, puffing until the end glowed at me like the hot orange eye of a dragon.

  He sighed, the way he sighed when he was forced to deliver some bad news to his investors, and closed my diary. “What fanciful nonsense, January. How often have I tried to cure you of it?”

  He ran his thumb across the cover of my diary and then deliberately, almost mournfully, tossed it into the messy heap of lumber behind him.

  “No! You can’t—”

  “I’m sorry, January. Truly.” He met my eyes and made an abortive movement with his hand,
as if he wanted to reach toward me. “But this is simply what must be done, for your sake. I’ll expect you at dinner.”

  I wanted to fight him. To argue, to snatch my diary out of the dirt—but I couldn’t.

  I ran away instead. Back across the field, back up winding dirt roads, back into the sour-smelling hotel lobby.

  And so the very beginning of my story features a skinny-legged girl on the run twice in the space of a few hours. It’s not a very heroic introduction, is it? But—if you’re an in-between sort of creature with no family and no money, with nothing but your own two legs and a silver coin—sometimes running away is the only thing you can do.

  And anyway, if I hadn’t been the kind of girl who ran away, I wouldn’t have found the blue Door. And there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell.

  The fear of God and Mr. Locke kept me quiet that evening and the following day. I was well watched by Mr. Stirling and the nervous hotel manager, who herded me the way you might handle a valuable but dangerous zoo animal. I amused myself for a while by slamming the keys on the grand piano and watching him flinch, but eventually I was shepherded back into my room and advised to go to sleep.

  I was out the low window and dodging through the alley before the sun had fully set. The road was scattered with shadows like shallow black pools, and by the time I reached the field, stars were shimmering through the hot haze of smoke and tobacco that hung over Ninley. I stumbled through the grass, squinting into the gloom for that house-of-cards shape.

  The blue Door wasn’t there.

  Instead, I found a ragged black circle in the grass. Ash and char were all that remained of my Door. My pocket diary lay among the coals, curled and blackened. I left it there.

  When I stumbled back into the sagging, not-very-grand hotel, the sky was tar-black and my knee socks were stained. Mr. Locke was sitting in an oily blue cloud of smoke in the lobby with his ledgers and papers spread before him and his favorite jade tumbler full of evening scotch.

  “And where have you been this evening? Did you walk back through that door and find yourself on Mars? Or the moon, perhaps?” But his tone was gentle. The thing about Mr. Locke is that he really was kind to me. Even during the worst of it, he was always kind.

  “No,” I admitted. “But I bet there are more Doors just like it. I bet I could find them and write about them and they’d all open. And I don’t care if you don’t believe me.” Why didn’t I just keep my stupid mouth closed? Why didn’t I shake my head and apologize with a hint of tears in my voice, and slink off to bed with the memory of the blue Door like a secret talisman in my pocket? Because I was seven and stubborn, and didn’t yet understand the cost of true stories.

  “Is that so,” was all Mr. Locke said, and I marched to my room under the impression that I’d evaded more severe punishment.

  It wasn’t until we arrived back in Vermont a week later that I realized I was wrong.

  Locke House was an immense red stone castle perched at the edge of Lake Champlain, topped with a forest of chimneys and copper-roofed towers. Its innards were wood-paneled and labyrinthine, bristling with the strange and rare and valuable; a Boston Herald columnist had once described it as “architecturally fanciful, more reminiscent of Ivanhoe than a modern man’s abode.” It was rumored that a mad Scotsman had commissioned it in the 1790s, spent a week living in it, and then vanished forevermore. Mr. Locke bought it at auction in the 1880s and began filling it with the world’s wonders.

  Father and I were stuffed into two rooms on the third story: a tidy, square office for him, with a big desk and a single window, and a gray, musty-smelling room with two narrow beds for me and my nursemaid. The newest one was a German immigrant named Miss Wilda, who wore heavy black woolen gowns and an expression that said she hadn’t seen much of the twentieth century yet but heartily disapproved of it thus far. She liked hymns and freshly folded laundry, and detested fuss, mess, and cheek. We were natural enemies.

  Upon our return, Wilda and Mr. Locke had a hurried conversation in the hall. Her eyes glittered at me like overshined coat buttons.

  “Mr. Locke tells me you’ve been overstimulated lately, nearly hysterical, little dove.” Miss Wilda often called me little dove; she was a believer in the power of suggestion.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Ah, poor dear. We’ll have you right as the rain in no time at all.”

  The cure for overstimulation was a calm, structured environment without distraction; my room was therefore summarily stripped of everything colorful or whimsical or dear. The curtains were drawn and the bookshelf cleared of anything more exciting than A Child’s Illustrated Bible. My favorite pink-and-gold bedspread—Father had sent it to me from Bangalore the previous year—was exchanged for starched white sheets. Samuel was forbidden to visit.

  Miss Wilda’s key slid and thunked in the keyhole, and I was alone.

  At first I imagined myself a prisoner of war resisting the redcoats or rebels and practiced my expression of stoic resistance. But by the second day the silence was like two thumbs pressing against my eardrums and my legs shuddered and shook with the desire to run and keep running, back to that cedar-spiraled field, through the ashes of the blue Door to some other world.

  On the third day, my room became a cell, which became a cage, which became a coffin, and I discovered the very deepest fear that swam through my heart like eels in undersea caves: to be locked away, trapped and alone.

  Something in the center of me cracked. I tore at the curtains with clawed nails, I ripped the knobs from dresser drawers, I beat my small fists against the locked door, and then I sat on the floor and wept great hiccuping rivers of tears until Miss Wilda returned with a syrupy spoonful of something that took me away from myself for a while. My muscles turned to oiled, languorous rivers and my head bobbed loosely along the surface. The creep of shadows across the rugs became a terrible drama so absorbing there wasn’t room for anything else in my head until I fell asleep.

  When I woke, Mr. Locke was sitting at the side of my bed reading a newspaper. “Morning, my dear. And how are you feeling?”

  I swallowed sour spit. “Better, sir.”

  “I’m glad.” He folded his paper with architectural precision. “Listen to me very carefully, January. You are a girl of very great potential—immense, even!—but you’ve got to learn to behave yourself. From now on there will be no more fanciful nonsense, or running off, or doors that lead places they shouldn’t.”

  His expression as he surveyed me made me think of old-timey illustrations of God: severely paternal, bestowing the kind of love that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. His eyes were stones, pressing down. “You are going to mind your place and be a good girl.”

  I wanted desperately to be worthy of Mr. Locke’s love. “Yes, sir,” I whispered. And I was.

  My father didn’t return until November, looking as creased and tired as his luggage. His arrival followed its usual pattern: the wagon crunched its way up the drive and stopped before the stone majesty of Locke House. Mr. Locke went out to offer congratulatory backslapping and I waited in the front hall with Miss Wilda, dressed in a jumper so starched I felt like a turtle in an overlarge shell.

  The door opened and he stood silhouetted, looking very dark and foreign in the pale November light. He paused on the threshold because this was generally the moment fifty pounds of excited young girl rocketed into his kneecaps.

  But I didn’t move. For the first time in my life, I didn’t run to him. The silhouette’s shoulders sagged.

  It seems cruel to you, doesn’t it? A sullen child punishing her father for his absence. But I assure you my intentions at the time were thoroughly muddled; there was just something about the shape of him in the doorway that made me dizzy with anger. Maybe because he smelled like jungles and steamships and adventures, like shadowed caves and unseen wonders, and my world was so ferociously mundane. Or maybe just because I’d been locked away and he hadn’t been there to open the door.

&nbs
p; He took three hesitant steps and crouched before me in the foyer. He looked older than I remembered, the stubble on his chin shining dull silver instead of black, as if every day he spent away from me were three days in his world. The sadness was the same as it always was, though, like a veil drawn over his eyes.

  He rested a hand on my shoulder, black snakes of tattoos twisting around his wrists. “January, is something wrong?”

  The familiar sound of my name in his mouth, his strange-but-not-strange accent, almost undid me. I wanted to tell him the truth—I stumbled over something grand and wild, something that rips a hole in the shape of the world. I wrote something and it was true—but I’d learned better. I was a good girl now.

  “Everything is fine, sir,” I answered, and watched the cool grown-up-ness of my voice hit my father like a slap.

  I didn’t speak to him over the dinner table that evening, and I didn’t sneak into his room that night to beg stories from him (and he was a champion storyteller, let me tell you; he always said ninety-nine percent of his job was following the stories and seeing where they led).

  But I was done with that fanciful nonsense. No more doors or Doors, no more dreams of silver seas and whitewashed cities. No more stories. I imagined this was just one of those lessons implicit in the process of growing up, which everyone learns eventually.

  I’ll tell you a secret, though: I still had that silver coin with the portrait of the strange queen on it. I kept it in a tiny pocket sewed in my underskirt, flesh-warm against my waist, and when I held it I could smell the sea.