The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  “I first came to this world in 1881, by your calendar, and met a girl named Adelaide Lee Larson.” His voice absented itself briefly, and returned as a whisper: “I loved her from that day forward.”

  Yule spoke slowly at first, in short, bare sentences, but quickly found himself stumbling into paragraphs and pages, until he was speaking in an endless, gasping stream. It didn’t feel particularly good or bad, but merely necessary, as if those pale eyes were twin stones sitting on his chest, forcing the words out of him.

  He told the stranger about the closing of the door and his subsequent dedication to the scholarly study of doors. About Adelaide’s own explorations and their reunion on the shores of the City of Plumm. About their daughter, and their journey back to the mountaintop door, and the breaking of the world.

  “And now I don’t know—I don’t know what to do, or where to go. I have to find another door home, I have to know if she survived—I’m sure she did, she was always so tough—but my baby girl, my January—”

  “Stop blubbering, boy.” Yule hiccuped to a stop, his hands twisting in his lap, rubbing the words on his arm (scholar, husband, father) and wondering if any of them were still true. “I am, as I said before, a collector. As such I employ a handful of field agents to gallivant about the world collecting things—sculptures, vases, exotic birds, et cetera. Now it seems to me these—doors, you call them?—could lead one to objects of particular rarity. Bordering on the mythological, even.” The man leaned forward, radiating hunger. “Is that not so?”

  Yule blinked at him, dimly. “I suppose—yes, it is so. In my researches I noted that things that are commonplace in one world may be perceived as miraculous in another, due to the transition in contextual cultural understa—”

  “Precisely. Yes.” The man smiled, sat back, and removed a fat stub of cigar from his coat pocket. Then came the sulfur smell of a struck match and the bluish stink of tobacco. “Now, it seems to me we might strike a mutually profitable arrangement, my boy.” He shook the match out and flicked the remains to the floor. “You are in need of shelter, food, employment, and—unless I am much mistaken—funding and opportunity to search for a way back to your dear likely departed wife.”

  “She isn’t—”

  The man ignored him. “Consider it done. All of it. Room and board, and an unlimited stipend for research and travel. You can look for your door as long as you like anywhere you like, but in exchange—” He smiled, teeth shining ivory through the cigar smoke. “You’ll help me create a collection that makes the Smithsonian look like a pauper’s attic. Find the rare, the strange, the impossible, the otherworldly—the powerful, even. And bring it back to me.”

  Yule’s eyes focused on the man more clearly than they previously had, his pulse rocketing with a sudden surge of hope. He swore, softly, in his own language. “And perhaps—a wet nurse, to travel with me? Just for a little while, for my little girl—”

  The man whuffled through his substantial mustache. “Well, as to that… This world isn’t a particularly safe place for young girls, you’ll soon find out. I rather thought she could stay with me. My house is quite large and”—he coughed, looking away from Yule for the first time and fixing his gaze instead on the far wall—“I have no children of my own. It would be no trouble.”

  He looked back at Yule. “What do you say, sir?”

  Yule could not speak for a moment. It was everything he could have hoped for—sufficient time and money to search for a door back to the Written, a safe place for January, a way forward out of the darkness—but he found himself hesitating. Despair, once established, can be quite difficult to uproot.

  Yule took a breath and extended his hand in the manner Adelaide had once shown him. The stranger took it, with a smile that revealed a higher-than-necessary number of teeth.

  “And what’s your name, dear boy?”

  “… Julian. Julian Scaller.”

  “Cornelius Locke. Thrilled to have you on board, Mr. Scaller.”

  As a young man in the Written, Julian searched for doors with the boundless confidence of a young person in love who assumes the world will contort itself to accommodate his desires. There were times—after fruitless weeks of trawling through the archives of some distant City, eyes aching from twisting themselves around half a dozen languages, or after miles of hiking across jungly hillsides without the slightest sign of a door—when he felt doubt creep in. Treacherous thoughts slunk through his skull as he lay in the unguarded place between sleeping and waking, thoughts like What if I grow old searching for her, and never find her?

  But by morning such thoughts had burned away like mist at dawn and left nothing behind them at all. He simply rose, and kept searching.

  Now, trapped in Adelaide’s world, I search with the desperation of an old man who understands that time is a precious and finite thing, beating away like a second hand in my chest.

  Some of that time I’ve spent simply learning how to navigate this world—a place I find baffling, sometimes cruel, and profoundly unwelcoming. There are rules about wealth and status, borders and passports, guns and public restrooms and the shade of my skin, all of which change according to my precise location and timing. In one place it might be perfectly permissible to visit the university library and borrow a few books; yet the same action in another place might inspire a call to the local police, who dislike my attitude, arrest me, and refuse to release me until Mr. Locke wires an apology and an upsetting amount of money to the Orleans County station. Under certain conditions I might meet with other scholars in my field and hold forth on the archaeological value of mythmaking; at other times I am treated like a rather clever dog that has learned to speak English. I have been feted by Persian princes for my discoveries; I have been spat on in the street for failing to cast my eyes aside. I am invited to dine at Cornelius’s table, but never to join his Archaeological Society.

  In fairness, I have also seen the beautiful and admirable in this world: a group of girls flying kites in Gujarat, moving in a pink and turquoise blur; a blue heron fixing me with its golden stare on the banks of the Mississippi; two young soldiers kissing in a dim alley in Sebastopol. It is not a wholly evil world, but it will never be mine.

  I’ve wasted more time fulfilling my end of Cornelius’s bargain. And what a devil’s bargain it’s turned out to be: my papers at the border identify my occupation as an exploratory archaeological researcher, but they might more accurately say well-dressed grave robber. I once overheard the Uyghurs of China refer to me by a long and complicated name filled with fricatives and unpronounceable combinations of consonants—it means the story-eater.

  This is what I am, what I have become: a scavenger scouring the earth, burrowing into its most secret and beautiful places and harvesting its treasures and myths. Eating its stories. I have chiseled out sections of sacred art from temple walls; I’ve stolen urns and masks and scepters and magic lamps; I’ve unearthed tombs and stolen jewels from the arms of the dead—in this world and a hundred others. All for the sake of a rich man’s collection on the other side of the world.

  What a shameful thing, that a Scholar of the City of Nin should become a story-eater. What would your mother say?

  I would do worse things to find my way back to her.

  But I’m running out of time. Your face is my hourglass: each time I return to Locke House it’s as if I’ve been gone for decades rather than weeks. Entire lifetimes have bloomed and faded for you, months of secret trials and triumphs that have subtly molded your features into someone I hardly recognize. You’ve grown tall and silent, with the mistrustful stillness of a doe just before she bolts.

  Sometimes—when I’m either too tired or too drunk to steer my thoughts away from dangerous places—I wonder what your mother would think if she could see you. Your features so plainly and painfully her own, but your spirit tightly laced beneath good manners and the invisible burden of unbelonging. She had dreamed for you a different life, one profoundly and perilously free, unb
ounded, every door standing open before you.

  Instead, I’ve given you Locke House and Cornelius and that awful German woman who looks at me as if I am unwashed laundry. I’ve left you alone, orphaned, ignorant of the wondrous and terrible things seething just beneath the surface of reality. Cornelius says it’s for the best; he says it isn’t healthy for young girls to grow up with their heads full of doors and other worlds, that the time isn’t right. And after all he’s done—rescuing us, employing me, raising you as he might his own daughter—who am I to object?

  And yet: If I ever find your mother again, will she forgive me?

  This is something I do not let myself think. I will begin again on a fresh sheet of paper so I do not see the words glaring up at me from the page.

  Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerized by the sight of our own broken hearts.

  This is why I didn’t notice for so long: the doors are closing. Or, perhaps more accurately, the doors are being closed.

  I should have seen it sooner, but I was even more obsessed in the earliest years, convinced that the very next door would open onto the cerulean seas of my homeland. I followed myths and stories and rumors, I looked for upheavals and revolutions, and at their twisted roots I often found doorways. None of them led me back to her, and so I abandoned them all as quickly as I could, taking time only to scavenge and plunder. Then I packed their stolen treasures in sawdust, scrawled 1611 CHAMPLAIN DRIVE, SHELBURNE, VERMONT on the crate, and departed for the next steamer, the next story, the next door.

  I did not linger long enough to see what came next: unexplained forest fires, unscheduled demolitions of historic buildings, floods, property development, cave-ins, gas leaks, and explosions. Sourceless, blameless disasters that turned the doors to rubble and ash and broke the secret links between the worlds.

  When I finally recognized the pattern—sitting on a hotel balcony reading an article in the Vancouver Sun about a mine-shaft collapse where I’d found a door only the week before—I did not at first blame human agency. I blamed time. I blamed the twentieth century, which seemed hell-bent on Ouroboran self-destruction. I thought doors might not belong in the modern world, that all doors were destined to close eventually.

  I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

  Perhaps I knew the truth, even before I had proof. I felt myself growing suspicious, worrying that strangers were watching me in Bangalore restaurants, hearing footsteps behind me in the alleys of Rio. Around that time I began writing my missives back to Cornelius in a code of my own invention, convinced that some unknown entity was intercepting my reports. It made no difference; the doors kept closing.

  I reasoned with myself: What did it matter that these particular doors were destroyed? They were all the wrong doors. None of them would take me back to Ade, to our stone house above the City of Nin, to that moment when I climbed the hillside and saw the two of you curled on the quilt: golden, whole, perfect.

  But even in the depths of my self-pity, another thought occurred to me: What happens to a world without doors? Hadn’t I concluded that doors introduce change, back when I was a Scholar rather than a grave robber? I’d hypothesized that doors were vital avenues, allowing the mysterious and miraculous to flow freely between worlds.

  Already I imagine I see the effects of their absence in this world: a subtle stagnation, a staleness, like a house that has been left shut up all summer. There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.

  I believe I already know what happens to a world without doors.

  But to stop looking for doors would be to stop looking for your mother, and I cannot. I cannot.

  I began retracing Ade’s decade-old footsteps, on the theory that the door to the Written might be hidden in some other world. It was not always easy, piecing together the stories she told me with stories overheard in busy streets or dingy bars, gin-soaked and garbled, but I was persistent. I found the St. Ours door, the Haitian door, the selkie door, a dozen others—all of them are gone now. Burnt, collapsed, destroyed, forgotten.

  It wasn’t until 1907 that I caught a glimpse of my pursuers. I’d finally found the Greek door—a cold stone slab in an abandoned church—which led to a world Ade had once described as a “black pit of hell.” I had no interest in repeating her experiences (she was, by her testimony, nearly shanghaied by an ice-eyed chieftainess), and so did not linger long inside it. I wandered for less than a day, creeping fearfully through the snow, but found nothing alive and nothing worth stealing. There were only endless rows of black pines and a distant horizon the color of gunmetal, and the wracked remains of some sort of fort or village. If there were any other doors in that place, I did not linger to find them.

  I crawled back through the stone door into the mold-splotched interior of St. Peter’s Church. It was only after I’d emerged—shivering in heaving spasms, inhaling the salt and lime smell of a Mediterranean evening—that I noticed something standing on the tile floor that hadn’t previously been there: a pair of black-booted feet.

  They belonged to a tall, heavy-browed man wearing the brass-buttoned uniform and round cap of a Greek police officer. He did not look particularly surprised to see a snow-dusted foreigner crawling out of the wall, but merely a little inconvenienced.

  I scrambled to my feet. “Who—what are you doing here?”

  He shrugged and spread his hands. “Exactly as I please.” He spoke guttural, accented English. “Although I am I think a little early.” He sighed and made a show of brushing off a pew and sitting down to wait.

  I swallowed. “I know what you’re here for. Don’t try to pretend. And I won’t let you, not this time—”

  His mocking laughter punctured my daring little speech. “Oh, don’t be foolish, Mr. Scaller. Return to that nasty little hut on the shore, buy yourself a steamer ticket in the morning, and forget about this place, eh? You have finished here.”

  It was all my most paranoid fantasies come true: he knew my name, knew about the shack I’d rented from a fisherwoman, perhaps knew the true nature of my researches.

  “No. I won’t let it happen again—”

  The man waved a dismissive hand at me, as if I were a child resisting bedtime. “Yes, you will. You will leave without any fuss. You will not tell another soul. And then you will sniff out the next door for us like a good dog.”

  “And why’s that?” My voice had gone high and taut and I wished, piercingly, for Adelaide. She was always the brave one.

  He watched me almost pityingly. “Children,” he sighed. “They grow up so fast, yes? Little January will be thirteen in just a few months.”

  We stood in silence while I listened to the sound of my own heart beating and thought of you, waiting for me an ocean away.

  I left.

  I purchased my steamer ticket the following morning and bought a paper from the Foreign Affairs stand in Valencia three days later. On the sixth page, printed in blurred Greek type, was a small column about a sudden and inexplicable rock slide on the coast of Crete. No one had been hurt, but a road had been buried and an old, mostly forgotten church had been reduced to rubble. The local police chief was quoted describing the event as “unfortunate, but inevitable.”

  You will find below a partial reproduction of a list recorded in my notes in July 1907. It is such a scholar’s impulse, to cope with a dangerous and murky situation by sitting at his desk and writing a list. What would your mother have done, I wonder. One imagines a great deal more noise and dis
ruption, and perhaps a body count.

  I titled the page Various Responses to the Continuing Situation Regarding the Nefarious Closing of Doors and Potential Risks to Immediate Family Members and underlined it several times.

  A. Expose the plot. Publish findings thus far (write to the Times? Take out an ad?) and denounce the activities of shadowy organization. Points in favor: could be done quickly; minimal disruption to January’s life. Points against: likelihood of total failure (would papers publish findings without evidence?); loss of Cornelius’s trust and protection; danger of (violent) retribution from unknown parties.

  B. Go to Cornelius. Explain my fears more fully and request additional security for January. In favor: Locke’s considerable resources could command a high degree of safety. Against: He hasn’t been sympathetic to my concerns thus far; the terms delusional paranoias and ridiculous flimflammery have been used.

  C. Remove January to safe, secondary location. If she were hidden in some other stronghold, very quietly, pursuers might not find her. In favor: J kept safe. Against: difficulty of finding safe location; difficulty of managing Cornelius’s attachment to J; uncertainty of success/risk to J’s safety; maximum disruption of daily life.

  I believe she loves Locke House, despite everything. When she was young I would often arrive to find a flustered nursemaid and an absent daughter, and she would be discovered hours later building sand castles on the lakeshore, or playing endless games with the grocer’s son. Now I find her walking the halls with one hand on the dark wood paneling, as if she is stroking the spine of some great sprawling beast, or curled with her dog in a forgotten armchair in the attic. Would it be right to steal the only home she’s ever known, when I have stolen so much else from her already?

  D. Run away, take refuge in another world. I could find a door and go through it, taking January with me, and build a new life for the two of us in some safer, brighter world. In favor: ultimate safety from pursuers. Against: see above. And I am far from certain that all worlds connect to one another—were we to flee to another world, could I ever find the Written again? And if Ade should claw her way back home, would she ever find us?