The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  There was no E. Continue on precisely as before, but this is the course I ultimately chose. Life has a kind of momentum to it, I’ve found, an accumulated weight of decisions which becomes impossible to shift. I continued my thieving, chiseling away stories and boxing them up so that a rich man might brag to his rich friends; I continued my desperate search, following stories and unearthing doors; I continued to let them close behind me. I stopped looking over my shoulder.

  I made only three changes. The first involved an ivory door in the mountains of British East Africa and an uncomfortably close encounter with a Lee-Metford rifle, and ended in forging a passport and purchasing train tickets for a Miss Jane Irimu. It is not necessary to recount the full story of our meeting here, but only to note that she is one of the most fearless and casually violent persons I have ever met, and that I caused her inadvertent but terrible heartache. She also has a very particular empathy to your situation and it is my belief that she will protect you far more capably than I have. You ought to ask her for the full story one day.

  The second change was to find an escape route for the two of you, a bolt-hole which I hope you will never make use of. I will not describe it with any detail here—lest some prying, unfriendly eye come across this book—except to say there is one door I found which has not yet been closed. I traveled under an assumed name to discover it and burned my notes and papers once I had. I blamed my delayed return on stormy seas, and I suppose by then I had been so often absent from Locke House that neither Cornelius nor you asked anything further. I spoke of my true purpose to only one living soul; should you ever need a place to run, a place to hide from whatever it is that pursues me—follow Jane.

  The third change is this book you now hold in your hands. (Assuming I’ve had it bound. Otherwise I refer to a messy pile of typewritten papers tied together with packing twine and the shed skin of a flying snake, which I found in a viciously unpleasant world through a door in Australia.)

  I spend my evenings now gathering the disparate and wandering pieces of my own story—our story, I should call it—shepherding them into a straight line, and recording them as neatly as I can on the page. It is taxing work. Sometimes I am too exhausted from a day’s fruitless tramping through the Amazon or the Ozarks to write more than a sentence before bed. Sometimes I spend the entire day trapped in my camp by poor weather with nothing but a pen and paper for company, but still fail to write a single word because I’ve become trapped in the mirrored halls of my own memory and cannot escape (the nautilus-curve of your mother’s body around yours; the white-gold smear of her smile in the misted dawn of the Amarico).

  But I persist in writing, even when it feels like pressing forward through an endless briar patch, even when the ink looks smeary-red in the lamplight.

  Perhaps I keep writing because I was raised in a world where words have power, where curves and spirals of ink adorn sails and skin, where a sufficiently talented word-worker might reach out and remake her world. Perhaps I cannot believe words are entirely powerless, even here.

  Perhaps I simply need to leave some record, however wandering and unsubstantiated, so that another living soul can learn the truths I have worked so hard to unearth. So that someone else might read it and believe: there are ten thousand doors between ten thousand worlds, and someone is closing them. And I am helping them do it.

  Perhaps I write out of an altogether more desperate and naive hope: that someone braver and better than myself might atone for my sins and succeed where I failed. That someone might fight back against the shadowy machinations of those who wish to sever this world from all its cousins and render it barren, rational, profoundly alone.

  That someone, somehow, might forge themselves into a living key, and open the doors.

  END

  Post Script

  (Apologies for my penmanship—what would my mother say?—but I am in a great hurry, and don’t have time to get this typed and bound like the rest.)

  My dearest January,

  I found it. I found it.

  I am camped on one of the cold, wind-scoured islands north of Japan. Near the shore there’s an association of bamboo-grass huts and corrugated-tin shanties that might generously be called a village, but up on this mountainside there’s nothing but knotted grass and a few desiccated pines clinging gamely to the ashy soil. Before me stands an interesting formation: some of the tree boughs have twisted themselves into a sort of arch, looking out over the sea.

  If seen from the proper angle, it looks almost like a doorway.

  I found it by following the stories: Once there was a fisherman who folded the pages of books and turned them into sailing ships. The ships were fleet and light, and their sails were stained with ink. Once there was a little boy who disappeared in midwinter and returned sunburnt and warm. Once there was a priest with prayers written on his skin.

  I knew where it led before I stepped through it. Worlds, like houses, have very particular smells, so subtle and complex and varied you barely notice them, and the smell of the Written filtered through the pine boughs like a delicate fog. Sun, sea, the dust of crumbling book spines, the salt and spice of a thousand trade ships. Home.

  I am going through it as soon as I can. This very evening. I was careful on my journey here, but I fear I wasn’t careful enough. I fear they will find me—the door-closers, the world-killers. I hesitate even to look away from the doorway and down at this page, lest some spectral figure leap from the shadows and close it forever.

  But I will delay long enough to finish this. To tell you where I have gone and why, and send you this book through the Azure Chests of Tuya and Yuha—a rather useful pair of objects I found through a door in Alexandria, and one of the few treasures I declined to surrender entirely to Cornelius. I gave him one, but kept the other for myself.

  I’ve sent you trinkets and toys before—did you recognize them for what they were? The insufficient offerings of an absent father? A coward’s attempt to say: I think of you always, I love you, forgive me? I feared your disappointment, your rejection of my paltry, pitiful gifts.

  This book is my last such gift. My final insufficiency. It is a profoundly imperfect work, as you know very well by now, but it is the truth—a thing you deserved long before now, but which I could not give you. (I tried, once or twice. I came into your room, opened my mouth to tell you everything—and found myself voiceless. I fled from you and lay gasping in my own bed, almost choking on the weight of unsaid words in my throat. I suppose I am truly that much of a coward.)

  Well, no more silences. No more lies. I don’t know how often you visit the Azure Chest, so I’ve found a way to ensure that you find the book in a timely fashion—the birds here are trusting creatures, unfamiliar with the dangers of humankind.

  It contains only one falsehood of which I am aware: the claim that I wrote it for the sake of Scholarship or Knowledge or Moral Necessity. That I was trying to “leave a record behind me” or “document my findings” for some murky future reader, who might bravely take up my mantle.

  The truth is that I wrote it for you. I was always writing for you, every moment.

  Do you remember when you were six or seven and I returned from the Burmese expedition? It was the first time you didn’t run into my arms when I arrived (and how I longed for and dreaded those arrivals, when your dear hourglass face would tell me how much time I’d wasted). Instead you simply stood in your starched little dress, looking up at me as if I were a stranger on a crowded train car.

  Too many times, your eyes said. You left me too many times, and now something precious and fragile has broken between us.

  I wrote this book in the desperate, pitiable hope that I could repair it. As if I could atone for each missed holiday and absent hour, for all the years I spent wrapped in the selfishness of grief. But here, at the end, I know I cannot.

  I am leaving you again, more profoundly than I have ever done before.

  I can give you nothing but this book, and a prayer that thi
s door will not be closed. That you will find a way to follow me one day. That your mother is alive and waiting, and one day she will hold you again and what is shattered will be made whole.

  Trust Jane. Tell her—tell her I am sorry.

  The door calls me in your mother’s voice. I must go.

  Forgive me. Follow me.

  YS

  I can’t do it.

  I tried, January. I tried to leave you. But I merely stood on the threshold of my door, frozen, smelling the sweetness of my home world and willing myself to take that last, final step forward.

  I cannot. I cannot leave you. Not again. I am packing my things, returning to Locke House. I will bring you back here with me, and we will go through together or not at all. I am so sorry, gods, so sorry—I am coming.

  Wait for me.

  RUN JANUARY

  ARCADIA

  DO NOT TRUST

  The Driftwood Door

  I found Jane by following the rhythmic grind and thunk of a shovel in rocky earth. She worked steadily, digging in a low-lying spot in the center of the island, alone except for a fetid, marshy smell and the whining drone of several million mosquitoes.

  And, of course, Mr. Theodore Havemeyer.

  He was nothing but a stained bundle of sheets, muddy-white and vaguely larval. His hand—a colorless claw, dotted with oozing punctures roughly the size of Bad’s teeth—protruded from the wrapping. It cast a too-large shadow in the late-afternoon light.

  “Couldn’t we just, I don’t know, toss him in the lake? Or leave him?”

  The crunch of the shovel biting into the ground; the shush of dirt sliding off it. Jane did not look up at me, but a humorless smile appeared on her face. “You think the Havemeyers of the world just disappear? You think no one comes looking?” She shook her head and added comfortingly, “It’s good and wet here; he won’t last long.”

  This, I found, made me feel slightly ill, so I perched on a moss-eaten boulder and watched the crows gather along the pine boughs above us like poorly behaved funeral attendees, cawing and gossiping.

  The splintery handle of the shovel appeared in my vision. I took it, and made several subsequent discoveries: first, that digging is very hard and I was still weak and sick-feeling from escaping Brattleboro. Second, that human bodies are fairly large and require substantial holes. And third, that digging leaves plenty of room in your skull for thinking, even when sweat pricks your eyes and the skin of your palms stings in a raw, you-already-have-blisters kind of way.

  My father didn’t abandon me. He turned back for me. The thought was a small sun burning behind my eyes, too bright to look at safely. How long had I longed for some small proof of his love for me? But his love for my mother, his selfish sadness, had always been stronger—until the last. Until it hadn’t, and he’d turned away from the Door he’d wanted for seventeen years.

  So where is he? I wavered a little on that thought, pictured the mad scrawl of those final words—RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST—and retreated.

  What did this final chapter tell me, really, that I hadn’t already suspected? Well, first: that Mr. Locke had known full well that my father was Door-hunting, and had even hired him specifically to do so. I pictured the basement rooms of Locke House with their endless aisles of crates and cases, the rooms bristling with glass cases and neat labels—how many of those treasures were stolen from other worlds? How many of them were imbued with strange powers or uncanny magics?

  And how many had he sold or bartered away? I remembered the meeting I’d seen in London as a girl, the secret auction of valuable objects. There’d been Society members present, I was sure—that ferrety red-haired man, at least—so I supposed the Society, too, knew about my father and the Doors and the things he stole. And it must be the Society who stalked after him, haunting him, closing his Doors. But why, if they wanted the treasures he stole for them? Or perhaps they wanted to hoard the treasures for themselves, then seal the Doors against any further leakage. They’d like that; I’d spent enough time around rich and powerful men to know their affection for phrases like maintaining exclusivity and manufacturing demand through rarity.

  It made sense, almost. But who had closed my mother’s Door, that first Door in the field, all those years ago? And the mountaintop Door? My father hadn’t even been employed by Mr. Locke then. Had it been random misfortune, or had the Society been closing Doors for far longer than my father’s personal quest? They’d mentioned a Founder, once or twice, in reverent tones—perhaps the Society was far older than it seemed.

  It didn’t make sense, either, that they would harm their prize Door-hunter, but something had certainly prevented my father from coming back. Something had driven him to scrawl those last three lines. And now the Society wanted me. They’ll never stop looking for you, girl.

  There was a horrible, meaty crunch behind me.

  I turned to find Jane crouched over Havemeyer’s body with a mallet and a clinical expression. A peeled wooden stake now protruded from the white bundle, roughly where his heart would be.

  Jane shrugged at me. “Just in case.”

  I teetered for a moment between horror and humor, but I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It was an oversized, tiptoeing-toward-hysteria kind of laugh. Jane’s eyebrows rose, but then her head tilted back and she laughed alongside me. I heard a little of the same relief in her voice, too, and it occurred to me that her attitude of cool nerve and confidence might not, in fact, be wholly true.

  “You have read entirely too many penny dreadfuls,” I admonished her. She shrugged again, unrepentant, and I went back to my digging. It felt easier, somehow, as if something heavy had been perched on my shoulders and had flapped away at the sound of our laughter.

  I worked in silence for another minute or so, and then Jane began to speak. “In my world, it’s wisest to shoot anything strange or unusual you might meet in the forests, and this is why I almost killed your father the first time I saw him. My first shot went wide, though. Give me that, if you aren’t going to dig.”

  My shovelfuls had grown scant and random; I scrabbled out of the hole and Jane took my place. Her voice matched the jab-and-toss rhythm of her digging. “He began shouting and waving his arms, switching between a dozen or so languages. One of them was English; it had been a very long time since I’d heard English spoken aloud, and never by a dark-skinned, tattooed man who looked like a professor. So I did not shoot him.”

  The hole was now well past Jane’s waist, and every shovelful made a soupy, sucking sound. Gnats hovered like overeager dinner guests at its edges. “I took him back to my camp, fed him, and we traded stories. He asked if I’d ever found another door in this world, or heard any stories about written words coming true. No, I answered, and his shoulders slumped. I felt I should apologize, but did not know for what.

  “Then he gave me a warning: The doors are closing behind me, he said. Someone is following me. He begged me to return to my native world with him. He told me he knew what it was like to be trapped in a world not your own, urged me to go back with him. I refused.”

  “Why?” I perched at the edge of the hole, arms wrapped around my own knees. My borrowed skirt was already hopelessly muddied and stained, and for a disorienting moment I felt as if I’d been zipped backward to a time when I was young and obstreperous and gleefully unkempt.

  Jane climbed out of the hole and perched beside me. “Because the place you are born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I was born into a world that abandoned me, stole from me, rejected me; is it so surprising I found a better one?” She sighed, long and regretful. “But I wanted to make one last trip through the door, just in case this madman was correct and it was my only chance. Julian stayed camped at the foot of Mount Suswa while I went searching for more ammunition and for—for news of my sister.” Jane’s eyes flickered like lanterns in a gust of winter air, and the question what happened to her? died in my throat. There was a little silence, and when she spoke again her tone was brusque. “I re
turned to Julian’s camp. He asked me to stay again, and I laughed in his face—I’d seen what my home had become. White women watching me from train windows, poachers wearing foolish hats and posing for pictures beside animal carcasses, potbellied children begging in English, please-sah, please-sah. No. So Julian escorted me back to my ivory door to say good-bye. Except there was something strange waiting in the cave.”

  Jane was staring into the grave, face taut. “Piles of gray sticks bundled together, and wires running out, and a faint fizzing sound. Your father yelled and shoved me away, and then everything came apart. An explosion that scorched the backs of my arms and tossed both of us forward like matchsticks. I don’t know if I lost consciousness, but it felt like I blinked and suddenly there was a man standing above me, wearing a tan British uniform. And behind him, where the cave should have been, was nothing but rubble and dust.

  “His lips were moving, but something was wrong with my ears. Then he drew his pistol and pointed it at Julian. He should have pointed it at me—I was the one with a weapon—but he didn’t.” Jane’s lip curled. “When I die, I hope at least I don’t look so damn surprised.”

  I did not look at Havemeyer’s body, did not think about the neatness of the hole that had appeared in his chest.

  “I didn’t even wait for his body to hit the ground: I threw myself at the mountainside, tearing away stones and earth. By the time Julian stopped me my hands looked like bushmeat. He held me back and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ until I understood: I was trapped here, in this world, forever.”

  I’d never seen Jane cry, but I could feel a kind of rhythmic shuddering moving through her, like thunderclouds scudding across the bay. Neither of us spoke for a time but simply sat in the cooling evening and listened to the hollow, mournful hooting of a loon across the lake.