The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  The woman was breathless and stammering with fear. “My—my name is Mrs. Emily Brown and I just got a little turned around, I swear, please don’t hurt me, miss, please—”

  I almost believed her. I felt myself shrinking, retreating, except—there was something wrong with her voice. It didn’t actually sound like an old woman’s voice, now that I was standing close to her; it sounded like a younger person doing a slightly rude impression of an old woman, high and shaky.

  Her hand began to creep toward her skirts, voice still babbling with terror. Something silver glinted up at me from the black folds of cloth. I froze, had a half second’s vision of how disappointed Jane would be if I let a little old lady slit my throat—then knocked her hand away and scrabbled the knife out of her dress pocket. Something black and flaky crusted the blade.

  I threw it into the darkness and leveled the gun back at her chest. She’d stopped babbling.

  “Who. Are. You.” It sounded much better this time, almost menacing. I wished the gun would stop shaking.

  The woman’s mouth closed in an ugly seam. She glared for a moment, narrow-eyed, then clucked her tongue in disgust. She fished a cigarette from her pocket and struck a match, puffing until her cigarette glowed and crackled. White smoke streamed from her nostrils in a sigh.

  “I said—”

  “I see now why Cornelius and Havemeyer had such difficulty with you.” Her voice was much lower and sleeker-sounding now, slightly oily. “You’re a troublesome thing, aren’t you?”

  It’s an odd feeling, having one’s wildest suspicions proved true. It’s satisfying to find you aren’t insane, of course, but somewhat disheartening to realize you are indeed being hunted by a shadowy organization of apparently infinite reach.

  “Who—you’re from the Society, aren’t you? Did you kill Solomon?”

  The woman raised her eyebrows and flicked ash from her cigarette in a casual, masculine gesture. “Yes.”

  I swallowed. “And are you some kind of, of shapeshifter, or something?”

  “Goodness, what an imagination.” She reached behind her head and made a strange twisting gesture in the air, as if she were untying an invisible knot, and—

  Her face sagged and fell. She caught it in her hand, except it wasn’t a wrinkled, age-spotted hand anymore, and the mouth now smiling nastily at me wasn’t a damp gash. Only the watery eyes were unchanged.

  It was the red-haired man from Mr. Locke’s Society gatherings: ferrety, thin-faced, wearing a dark traveling suit now rather than gray skirts.

  He swept me an insincere bow, absurd in the empty darkness of a dead world, and held the mask up in the silvered moonlight. Horsehair straggled from it in tangled ropes. “Some Indian thing—a false-face, I think they call it? Your own dear father acquired it for us ages ago from a fracture south of Lake Ontario, and we’ve found it quite useful. Ugly old women are such unremarkable creatures.” He tucked the mask into his breast pocket.

  I swallowed shock, tried to make my voice sound menacing rather than stunned. “And how did you find me?”

  “I’m generally agreed to be the best hunter, when things require hunting.” He sniffed dramatically, inhaling smoke, and laughed. Bad growled, the sound rolling across the plain, and Mr. Ilvane’s confident smile dimmed a little.

  He reached into his breast pocket again and removed something tarnished and coppery-green. “And I had this, of course.”

  I darted forward, snatched it, stepped back again. It was a sort of compass, except that there were no letters or numbers or even little tick marks indicating degrees. The arrow settled abruptly, pointing in a direction that I was fairly certain wasn’t north. I tossed it into the grass, heard it clatter against his knife.

  “But why?” I waved the gun a little wildly, watched his eyes track it nervously. “I’m not doing you any harm. Why not just leave me alone? What do you want?”

  He gave a coy shrug, smiling at my frustration, my fear.

  I was abruptly, entirely sick of it—of secrets and lies and almost-truths, things I half knew and half suspected, patched-together stories that were never told in order from beginning to end. It seemed to be an unspoken agreement in the world that young girls without money or means were simply too insignificant to be told everything. Even my own father had waited until the very last moment to tell me his whole truth.

  Enough. I felt the weight of the gun in my palm, an iron authority that meant—just for a moment—I could change the rules. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Ilvane. Please sit down.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You can stand if you like, but you’re going to tell me a very long story, and I’d hate for your legs to tire.” He lowered himself to the earth, legs crossed and face sullen.

  “Now.” I steadied the barrel directly over his chest. “Tell me everything, from the beginning. And if you make any sudden movements, I swear I’ll let Bad eat you.” Bad’s teeth were bared and shining blue-white; Ilvane’s throat bobbed in a swallow.

  “Our Founder came through his fracture in the seventeen-somethings, in England or Scotland, I don’t recall. He possessed an uncanny ability to sway people to his cause—it didn’t take him long to rise up in the world, and to see the world for what it was: a mess. Revolutions, upheavals, chaos, and bloodshed. Waste. And at the root of it all there were the aberrations—unnatural holes letting in all sorts of mischief. He began to repair them wherever he found them.

  “At first the Founder worked alone. But soon he began recruiting others: some like himself who were immigrants to this world, others who simply shared his interest in cultivating order.” I pictured Mr. Locke, young and ambitious and greedy—an ideal recruit. It must have been easy. “Together we made it our business to cleanse the world and keep it safe and prosperous.”

  “And to steal things, of course,” I added.

  He made a come-now sort of pout. “We found that certain objects and powers, when used sparingly by wise hands, could aid us in our mission. As do more material forms of wealth—all of us worked to gain positions of prestige and power. We pool our money and fund expeditions into every corner of the world, looking for fractures.

  “By the sixties we adopted a name and a respectable function: the New England Archaeological Society.” Ilvane made a little ta-da gesture with his hands and continued with earnest urgency. “And it’s been working. Empires are growing. Profits are rising. Revolutionaries and rabble-rousers are thin on the ground. And we cannot, will not, let a spoiled little interloper like you ruin all our efforts. So tell me, girl—what objects or powers do you have?” His eyes on me were damp and bright.

  I took a step backward. “It—that doesn’t matter. Now, stand up—” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—march him back into the city and deliver him to Jane like a cat depositing something unpleasant for her owner?—but Ilvane smiled suddenly.

  “You know, your father thought to thwart us. Look what happened to him.” He clucked his tongue.

  I stopped moving. I may even have stopped breathing.

  “You killed him, didn’t you.” All that grown-up-sounding authority had leaked out of my voice.

  Mr. Ilvane’s smile grew wider and sharper, foxlike. “He’d found us a fracture in Japan, as I’m sure you’ve realized. It was generally his custom to wander around inside for a day or two and return with a few interesting trinkets for Locke, and then depart. But this time he lingered. And I grew bored of waiting, bored of wearing this hideous thing—” He tapped his breast pocket above the old-woman mask.

  “One day he caught sight of me on the mountainside. He recognized me.” Ilvane shrugged, falsely apologetic. “The look on his face! I’d say he went white as a sheet, but with that complexion of his…‘You!’ he cried. ‘The Society!’ Well, really, imagine being surprised after seventeen years of being kept on a leash. Then he said some rather intemperate, tiresome things. Threatened to expose us—who would believe him, I ask you?—raved about saving his little girl, told me he’d k
eep this door open if it was the last thing he did… All very dramatic.”

  My pulse whispered no-no-no. The gun was trembling again.

  “Then he rushed back to his camp like an absolute madman. I followed.”

  “And you killed him.” Now my voice was less than a whisper, a strangled breath. After all this hoping and waiting and not knowing, after all this—I pictured his body frozen and forgotten, picked over by seabirds.

  Ilvane was still smiling, smiling. “He had a rifle, you know. I found it in his things, after. But he didn’t even try to reach it—he was writing when I dragged him out of his tent, writing as if his life depended on it. Fought me tooth and nail just to put his journal back in its box. Honestly, you should be thanking me for relieving you of such an unstable fellow.”

  I could almost see his hand, dark and ink-twined, scratching out those last desperate words: RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST. Trying to warn me.

  Now Ilvane’s smile prismed and blurred in my sight.

  “I set the fracture ablaze. It was dry pine, went up like a torch. Your father wept, January, he begged, before I shoved him through. I caught sight of his hands, briefly, flailing back through the flames, then nothing. He never emerged.”

  Ilvane watched me as he finished, his eyes hunger-bright. He wanted tears, I knew. He wanted heartbreak and despair, because my father was trapped forever in some other world and I was permanently, terribly alone. But—

  Alive, alive, alive. Father is alive. Not wracked and rotting on some foreign hillside, but alive, and finally gone home to his own true world. Even if I would never see him again.

  I closed my eyes and let the twin waves of loss and joy crash over me, let my legs go limp and my knees crunch to earth. Bad’s nose snuffled worriedly at my neck, checking for injuries.

  Too late, I heard the scuffling sounds of Ilvane moving. My eyes snapped open to find him scrabbling sideways for his knife and the copper compass.

  “No!” I shouted, but he was already running back toward the city, a black-and-red shadow darting through the grass. I fired the gun high into the night, saw him duck, and heard the echoing pound of his feet on the empty street. He disappeared into the tangle of abandoned houses.

  Bad and I tore after him. I hardly knew what I’d do if I caught him—the revolver hung heavy in my hand, and the image of Solomon’s white-draped body flashed sickeningly before me—but I couldn’t let him leave, couldn’t let him tell the Society where I was, where Arcadia was—

  Two tall figures reeled into the street ahead. Jane reached an arm out to catch me. “We heard a shot—what—”

  “Ilvane. From the Society. Went that way—think he’s trying to get back to the Door—” My words sputtered between gasps of air. Jane did not wait for clarification but simply ran, flowing down the hill in a long-striding lope several times faster than mine. Samuel fell in with Bad and me, stumbling over humped bricks and cracks.

  We skidded into the courtyard to find Jane crouching before the feather-curtained tunnel, lips peeled back in a hunter’s triumphant grin. Ilvane stood several paces away, eyes wild and nostrils flared in animal desperation.

  “That, I think, is enough,” Jane said coolly, and reached into her skirt pocket for Mr. Locke’s revolver. But then her face went slack. Her leopardess smile vanished.

  Because it wasn’t there. Because I’d stolen it from her.

  There was a single stretched second in which I fumbled with the gun, sweaty thumb slipping on the hammer, and Ilvane watched Jane’s empty hand emerge from her skirts. He smiled. And then he struck.

  There was a slash of silver, the gleam of something wet and wine-colored in the moonlight—and then he was gone, the golden curtain fluttering in his wake.

  Jane fell to her knees with a soft, surprised sigh.

  No. I don’t remember if I screamed it, if the word shattered against the clay ruins and echoed up the alleys, if there were answering shouts of alarm and running footsteps.

  I remember kneeling beside her, clutching at the long, gaping edges of the cut, seeing my own hands blacken with blood. I remember Jane’s expression of distant surprise.

  I remember Samuel crouching on her other side, his guttural hiss—“Bastard”—and the sight of his back disappearing through the curtain after Ilvane.

  And then there were other hands pressing beside mine—competent, probing hands—and a clean, crushed-mint smell. “S’all right, child, just give me some room.” I drew back to let the gray-haired woman bend closer over Jane, an old-fashioned lantern sputtering beside her. I held my blood-gummed hands awkwardly away from my body, as if hoping someone would tell them what to do.

  The woman called for clean cotton and boiled water and someone skittered to obey. Her voice was so calm, so unhurried, that the tiniest curl of hope unwound in my stomach.

  “Is she—will she—” My voice raw-sounding, like something recently peeled.

  The woman cast a harassed eye over her shoulder. “All this is just mess and show, girl. He didn’t get anything she can’t do without.” I blinked at her and she softened. “She’ll be fine, long as we can keep infection out.”

  I went slack with relief, muscles unspooling like cut wires. I pushed sticky palms into my eyes, pressing back the hysterical tears that sizzled just below the surface, and thought: She’s alive. I didn’t kill her.

  I stayed that way, half-slumped over my knees and weak with relief, until the feathered curtain rustled again. It was Samuel, and I knew from the grim line of his mouth that Mr. Ilvane had escaped back through the Door.

  Samuel did not look at the people now filling the square with fearful whispers, or at the ruby gleam of blood in the lantern light. He strode straight to me, feet bare and shirt half-buttoned, eyes roiling with some dark emotion. It was only when he stood directly above me that I knew what it was: fear.

  “I followed him to the tree,” he said softly. “I tried to follow him farther, tried to go through after him. But”—and I knew what he would say, knew it as surely as if I’d stood beside him on that empty plain—“there was nothing, no way through.”

  Samuel swallowed. “The door is closed.”

  The Lonely Door

  Samuel had spoken softly, his voice a tired rasp, but tragedy has its own terrible volume. It rolls and cracks, shakes the ground beneath your feet, lingers in the air like summer thunder.

  The Arcadians gathered in the courtyard fell silent, their eyes turned toward us in a dozen shades of disbelief and terror. The quiet stretched, taut as piano wire, until one man issued a strangled curse. Then came a rising clamor of panicked voices.

  “What will we do?”

  “My babies, my babies need—”

  “We’ll starve, every last one of us.”

  An infant woke and wailed in his mother’s arms, and she gazed down at his crumpled face in listless despair. Then a wide form shouldered past her and moved to the front of the crowd. Molly Neptune’s stovepipe hat was missing and the upward glow of the lantern painted shadowed hollows over her face.

  She held up two hands. “Enough. If the way is closed, we’ll find another way through. We’ll find another way to survive. Aren’t all of us here survivors, one way or the other?” She surveyed them with a kind of fierce love, willing strength into their shaking limbs. “But not tonight. Tonight we’ll rest. Tomorrow, we’ll plan.”

  I found myself leaning into the rumble of her voice, letting it beat back the tide of guilt and horror that threatened to swallow me—until her eyes met mine, and I watched all the warmth flow out of her face like dye running in the rain. It left nothing behind but bitter regret. Regret that she’d ever seen my father, perhaps, or ever offered Arcadia as a refuge; regret that she’d let me set foot in her fragile kingdom with monsters on my heels.

  She turned away and addressed the woman still bent over Jane. “Will she live, Iris?”

  Iris ducked her head. “Likely, ma’am. Except it’s deep in some places, and messy, and…”
I saw the pink dart of her tongue as she moistened her lips, the fearful flick of her eyes toward the feathered curtain. “And we’re out of iodine. Even salt water might do the job, but we, we can’t…” Her voice trailed to a racked whisper.

  Molly Neptune rested a hand gently on her shoulder and shook her head. “No use worrying now. You’ll do the best you can for her, and that’s it.” She called for two young men to help roll Jane onto a sheet and carry her into a nearby house. Iris trailed behind them, hands hanging bloody and empty at her sides.

  Molly’s eyes raked over us once more and her lips rippled as if she wanted to say something, but she turned away and followed the last trailing group of Arcadians back up the dark streets. Only now, when her people couldn’t see her, did she allow her shoulders to bow in defeat.

  I watched her until she disappeared into the depths of her doomed, beautiful city. I wondered how long they could last without supplies from their home world, and if a second city would die here among the bones of the first.

  I closed my eyes against the weight of guilt settling on my shoulders, heard the click of claws and the scuff of worn shoes as Samuel and Bad approached. They settled on either side of me, warm and constant as a pair of suns. What would happen to them, trapped in this starved world? I pictured Bad with sharp ribs and dull fur; Samuel with the ember-glow gone dull in his eyes. Jane might be swallowed by fever before she could even feel the desperate bite of hunger in her belly.

  No. I wouldn’t let it happen. Not when there was a chance—even the slimmest, wildest chance—that I could prevent it.

  “Samuel.” I was hoping to sound brave and resolute, but I just sounded tired. “Will you please go back to the house and get my father’s book for me? And an ink pen.”

  He went very still beside me, and I knew he understood what I intended to do. A small, treacherous part of me hoped he would grab my hands and beg me not to do it, like an actor in a moving-picture romance, but he didn’t. I supposed he didn’t much want to die in Arcadia either.

  He stood, slowly, and left the square. I sat beneath the half-moon, arm tight around Bad, and waited.