The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  And I left my mother’s house with the pillowcase clutched tight in my hand and Bad flying like a sleek bronze spear at my side.

  The Ash Door

  He was already waiting for me, of course.

  You know that feeling when you’re in a maze and you think you’ve almost made it out, but then you turn the corner and bam, you’re back at the entrance? That warped, eerie feeling of having fallen backward in time?

  That was how it felt to see the overgrown field and the black-suited shape waiting for me in the center of it. Like I’d made a mistake somewhere and circled back to the day when I was seven and found the Door.

  Except the scene had changed, subtly. When I was seven the grasses had been orange and autumn-dry, and now they were several hundred shades of green and studded with yellow bursts of goldenrod. I’d been neatly dressed in blue cotton, terribly alone except for my pretty little pocket diary, and now I was barefoot and dirt-grimed, with Bad padding beside me.

  And I’d been running away from Mr. Locke then, rather than toward him.

  “Hello, January. Sindbad, always a pleasure.” Mr. Locke looked a little travel-rumpled but otherwise precisely the same: square, pale-eyed, supremely confident. I remember being surprised, as if I expected him to be wearing a black cape lined with red silk or twirling a long mustache with a sinister smile, but he was just comfortable, familiar Mr. Locke.

  “Hello, sir,” I whispered. The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.

  He smiled in what he must have believed was a charming, friendly manner. “I was just starting to suspect I’d missed you, and you were already gallivanting off God-knows-where.”

  “No, sir.” The jagged tip of the pen pressed into my palm.

  “How lucky. And—good Lord, child, what have you done to your arm?” He squinted. “Tried to copy Daddy’s tattoos using a butcher knife, did you?”

  The next No, sir caught in my throat and refused to come out. My eyes had fallen on the weedy, mostly vanished circle of ash that had once been my blue Door, and standing before me was the man who had burned it down, betrayed my father, locked me away—and I didn’t owe him good manners. I didn’t owe him anything at all.

  I unbent my shoulders and raised my head. “I trusted you, you know. So did my father.”

  The joviality slid from Locke’s face like clown paint washing away in the rain. His gaze on me turned watchful and narrow-eyed. He didn’t answer.

  “I thought you were helping us. I thought you cared about us.” About me.

  Now he raised a placating hand. “Of course I do—”

  “But you betrayed us both, in the end. You used my father, lied to him, had him locked forever in another world. And then you lied to me, told me he was dead—” My voice was rising, boiling up from my chest. “You told me you were protecting me—”

  “January, I have protected you since the moment you came into this world!” Locke moved closer to me, hands outstretched as if he intended to place them on my shoulders. I stepped backward and Bad came to his feet, hackles rough, lips peeled back. If Mr. Locke hadn’t been firmly on his Please Do Not Ever Bite list, I think his teeth would’ve found flesh.

  Locke retreated. “I thought Theodore had that animal dumped in the lake. Drowning doesn’t seem to have improved his temper much, does it?” Bad and I glared.

  Locke sighed. “January, listen to me: when you and your father crashed through that door in Colorado just as we were closing it, my associates were all for smashing your skulls and leaving you for dead on the mountainside.”

  “From my father’s account, you gave it a good try,” I said coldly.

  Locke made a dismissive, gnat-swatting gesture. “A misunderstanding, I assure you. We were there because your mother had raised quite a fuss in the papers. Everybody made fun of the madwoman and her ship in the mountains, but we suspected there was more to it—and we were right, were we not?” He cleared his throat. “I’ll admit my man was a bit, ah, overexcited about your father, but the poor fellow had been tearing down a doorway when half a damned ship sailed through it! And anyway there was no lasting harm done. I had the two of you well taken care of while I consulted with the others.”

  “The Society, you mean.” Locke inclined his head in a genteel bow. “And they all advised you to commit double homicide, did they? And I’m supposed to be—to be grateful, that you didn’t do it?” I wanted to spit at him, scream at him until he understood how it felt to be small and lost and worthless. “Do they hand out medals for not murdering babies? Perhaps just a nice certificate?”

  I expected him to shout at me, perhaps even hoped he would. I wanted him to abandon this pretense of goodwill and good intentions, to cackle with glee. That was what villains were supposed to do; that was what gave the heroes permission to hate them.

  But Locke merely looked at me with one side of his mouth twisted up. “You’re upset with me. I understand.” I sincerely, deeply doubted it. “But you were exactly what we’d been striving so hard to prevent, you see, exactly what we’d sworn ourselves against: a random, foreign element, with the potential to instigate all sorts of trouble and disruption, which ought to be stamped out.”

  “My father was a grieving scholar. I was a half-orphaned baby. What sort of trouble could we cause?”

  Locke bowed again, his smile gone a little tight. “So I argued. I brought them all around, eventually—I am very persuasive when I wish to be.” A small, black laugh. “I explained about your father’s notes and papers, and his particular and personal motivation to seek out additional fractures. I suggested I might foster you myself, watch you carefully for any useful, unusual talents, and turn them to our purposes. I saved you, January.”

  How many times had he told me that, growing up? How many times had he retold the story of finding my poor father and taking him under his wing, of giving us fine clothes and spacious rooms, and how dare I talk to him like that? And every time I would wilt with guilt and gratitude, like a pet whose leash has been tugged.

  But now I was free. Free to hate him, free to run from him, free to write my own story. I turned the pen in my hand.

  “Listen, January, it’s getting hot.” Locke mopped the pearled sweat from his forehead theatrically. “Let’s you and I head back into town and discuss everything in a more civilized setting, hm? This has all been nothing but a series of misund—”

  “No.” I had a suspicion he wanted to get me away from here, away from the susurrating green field and the black remains of the Door. Or maybe he just wanted to get me back to town where he could call the police or the Society. “No. I think we’re through talking, actually. You should leave.”

  My voice had been so emotionless it could have been a conductor’s announcement on a train, but Mr. Locke threw up his hands in defense. “You don’t understand—you’ve suffered some personal misfortunes, I admit, but try not to be so selfish. Think about the good of the world, January! Think about what these ‘doors’—fractures, we call them, or aberrations—promote: disruption, madness, magic… they overturn order. I’ve seen a world without order, defined by constant competition for power and wealth, by the cruelties of change.”

  Now he did reach for me, resting his hand clumsily on my shoulder and ignoring Bad’s snarl. His eyes—colorless, glacial—stared into mine. “I wasted my youth in a world like that.”

  What? My fingers around the pen went slack.

  He spoke slowly, almost gently. “I was born into a cold, vicious world, but I escaped and found a better one. A softer world, full of potential. I have dedicated my life, and the better part of two centuries, to its betterment.”

  “But—you—two centuries?”

  Now there was pity in his voice, syrup-sweet and rancid. “I traveled in my youth, you see. Happened to find a fracture in the middle of Old China, and a very special jade cup—you’ve
seen it, I’m sure. It has the property of extending one’s life span. Perhaps indefinitely. We shall see.” I thought of Lizzie saying he hadn’t aged a day; thought of my father’s silvering hair, the lines framing his mouth.

  Locke sighed, and said softly, “I first came into this world in 1764, in the northern mountains of Scotland.”

  In England or Scotland, I don’t recall.

  I thought I’d circled back to the beginning of my own labyrinth. I thought I knew where I was. But now everything warped strangely in my vision and I realized I was still wandering in the heart of the maze, entirely lost.

  “You’re the Founder,” I whispered.

  And Mr. Locke smiled.

  I stumbled backward, clutching at Bad’s fur. “But how could—no. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care. I’m leaving.”

  I fumbled for the newsprint pages, held the pen tight in shaking fingers. Run away, run away. I was through with this world and its cruelties, its monsters and betrayals and stupid colored sections on its stupid trains—

  “Is that how you do it? Some sort of magic ink? Written words? I should have suspected as much.” Locke’s voice was genial, quite calm. “I don’t think so, my dear.” I glanced up at him, the split nib already touching the page—

  —and his eyes caught me like two silver fishhooks. “Drop that, January, and be still.” The pen and paper fell from my hands.

  Locke retrieved them, tucked the pen in his coat pocket, shredded the newsprint, and tossed the remains behind him. They fluttered like yellow-white moths into the grass.

  “You are going to listen to me now.” My pulse beat turgid and reluctant in my skull. I felt suspended, like some unlucky prehistoric girl preserved forever in a glacier. “When you’re done listening, you’re going to understand the work to which I’ve dedicated my life. And, I hope, how you might help me.”

  And so I listened, because I had to listen, because his eyes were hooks or knives or claws fastened tight in my flesh.

  “How is it your stories always start? Once upon a time there was a very unlucky little boy. He was born into a nasty, brutal, bitter world, a world too absorbed in killing and being killed even to name itself. The locals in your world called it Ifrinn, I later learned, and that’s what it was: hell. If hell were dark and frigid.”

  He wavered oddly between accents, his tone swerving between dry narration and bitter anger. It was as if the Mr. Locke I’d grown up with—his voice, his mannerisms, his posture—was just a sort of party mask, behind which lurked someone much older and stranger.

  “This unlucky boy fought in four battles before he was fourteen. Can you imagine? Boys and girls dressed in mangy animal skins, half-feral, running among the soldiers like hungry scavengers… Of course you can’t.

  “We fought for such meager rewards. A few snow-covered acres of good hunting ground, the rumor of treasure, pride. Sometimes we didn’t even know why we fought, except that our chieftainess willed it. How we loved her. How we hated her.” My expression must’ve changed, because Locke laughed. It was a perfectly normal-sounding laugh, the same jovial boom I’d heard how many hundreds of times, but it made the fine hairs on my arms stand upright.

  “Yes, both. Always both. I imagine it’s much the same way you feel about me, really, and don’t think the irony is lost on me. But I was never cruel to you, the way our rulers were.” Now his tone turned almost anxious, as if he were afraid one or both of us might not quite believe him. “I never made you do anything against your own interest. But in Ifrinn they used us, like soldiers use bullets. It was too damned cold to live clanless and hungry, but we might have tried anyway if it weren’t for the Birthright.”

  I heard the capital B pressing up through Locke’s sentence, casting a bulbous shadow behind it, but didn’t understand it.

  “I should’ve started with the Birthright. I’ve gotten it all jumbled up.” Locke dabbed sweat from his lip. “This storytelling rubbish is harder than it looks, eh? The Birthright. Around sixteen or seventeen, a very few children in Ifrinn manifest a, ah, particular ability. It’s easy, at first, to mistake the children as bullies or charmers. But they possess something much rarer: the power to rule. To sway men’s minds, to bend their wills like smiths bend hot iron… And then there are the eyes, of course. The final sign.”

  Locke leaned toward me and widened his own ice-pale eyes for my inspection. Softly, he asked, “What color would you call them? We had a word for it that English doesn’t supply, which referred to a very particular kind of snow that has fallen and refrozen, so that there’s a gray translucency to it…”

  No, I thought, but the word felt weak and distant in my head, like someone calling for help a long way away. A broken grass-stem poked into the bare arch of my foot; I pressed down against it, felt it peel away a semicircle of skin, felt the prickle of raw skin in the open air.

  Locke’s face was still close to mine. “You already know all about the Birthright, of course. Such a willful little girl you were.”

  Like smiths bend hot iron. I saw myself briefly as a piece of worked metal glowing dull orange, hammered and hammered—

  Locke straightened again. “The Birthright was an invitation to rule. We were expected either to challenge our present chieftainess in a battle of wills, or skulk off and form our own miserable clan. I challenged her as soon as I could, the old bitch, left her weeping and broken, and claimed my Birthright at sixteen.” His voice was savage with satisfaction.

  “But nothing lasted in that world. There were always new clans, new leaders, new wars. Challengers to my rule. Dissidence. There was a night raid, a battle of wills, which I lost, and I ran away and… You know what I found, of course.”

  My mouth moved, soundless. A Door.

  He smiled indulgently. “Quite right. A crevice in a glacier that led to another world. And oh, what a world it is! Rich, green, warm, populated by weak-eyed people who cave to my slightest suggestion—everything Ifrinn was not. It took only a few hours before I returned to the fracture and smashed it to rubble with my bare hands.”

  I gasped, eyes wide, and Locke scoffed. “What? You think I should’ve left it wide open, so some Ifrinn bastard could sneak out after me? Could ruin my lovely, soft world? No.” He was strident and principled, like a priest trying hard to save his sinful flock. Except there was something else panting beneath the preaching, something that made me think of cornered dogs and drowning men, a kind of clawing terror. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, January—you call them ‘doors,’ as if they were necessary, everyday sorts of things, but they’re quite the opposite. They let in all manner of dangerous things.”

  Like you. Like me?

  “I found a town big enough to grant a little anonymity. Clothes and food were easy for a Birthrighted man to acquire. So was a rather nice home, and an obliging young woman to teach me the language.” A smug smile. “She told me stories about great winged snakes that lived in the mountains with hoards of gold, and how you must never look them in the eyes lest they steal your soul.” A fond chuckle. “I confess, I’ve always liked nice things—what is Locke House if not a dragon’s hoard?”

  Locke began to pace in irregular circles, fishing a half-chewed cigar from his coat pocket and gesticulating against the noon-blue sky. He told me about his early years spent studying language, geography, history, economics; his travels abroad and his discovery of additional aberrations, which he plundered and destroyed at once; his conclusion that his new world was still plagued by all manner of mess and malcontent (“First the Americans, then the damned French, even the Haitians! One after the other!”) but was steadily improving under the guidance of orderly new empires.

  I listened, with the sun pulsing against my skin like a hot yellow heartbeat and the words be still circling inside my head like harpies. I felt twelve again, being lectured at in his office and staring at his Enfield revolver in its glass case.

  He joined the Honorable East India Company in 1781. He rose through the ranks quickl
y, of course—“And it wasn’t all my Birthright, either, don’t look at me like that”—made himself a largish fortune, pursued business ventures of his own, retired and rejoined the company several times to allay suspicion about his age, built himself homes in London, Stockholm, Chicago, even a green little estate in Vermont in the 1790s. He alternated between his homes, of course, selling and repurchasing them half a dozen times.

  For a long time, he’d thought it would be enough.

  But then in 1857 a certain group of mutinous colonial subjects rose up, set a few British forts aflame, and ran victorious through the countryside for almost a year before being brutally subjugated once more.

  “I was there, January. In Delhi. I went around to every mutineer I could find—which wasn’t many, as the captain had been firing them from cannons—and all of them told me the same story: an old Bengali woman in Meerut had slipped through a strange archway and returned twelve days later. She had spoken with some sort of oracular creature that told her she and all her people would one day be free from foreign rule. And so they’d taken up arms against us.”

  Locke’s hands rose into the air in remembered outrage. “A fracture! A damned door, lurking beneath my very nose!” He exhaled forcefully and tucked his thumbs behind his belt, as if willing himself calm. “I came to realize the urgency of my mission, the importance of closing the fractures. I took it upon myself to recruit others to my cause.”

  And thus was the Society formed, a secretive association of the powerful: an old man in Volgograd who kept his heart in a little velvet box; a wealthy heiress in Sweden; a fellow in the Philippines who transformed into a great black boar; a handful of princes and a dozen members of Congress; a white-skinned creature in Rumania who fed on human warmth.

  Now Locke spiraled back to face me in his pacing, snagged my eyes with his own. “We have done our work well. For half a century we’ve labored in the shadows to keep this world safe and prosperous—we’ve closed dozens of fractures, maybe hundreds—we’ve helped build a stable, bright future. But, January”—his gaze intensified—“it isn’t enough. There are still murmurs of discontent, threats to stability, dangerous fluctuations. We need all the help we can find, frankly, especially now that your father is gone.”