The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  Sometimes my grandparents sit with us and watch, too. We don’t do a lot of talking, probably because we’re busy being mutually stunned at one another’s existence, but I like the feel of them sitting near me. Tilsa, my grandmother, often holds my hand, as if she isn’t quite convinced I’m real.

  Sometimes, when it’s just the two of us, my mother and I talk. I told her about Locke House and the Society and the asylum, about Father and Jane and rather a lot about you. I told her about Aunt Lizzie living alone on the Larson farm. (“Lord, I’d like to see her,” my mother sighed. I reminded her that the Door was open and she could skip through it any day of the week, and her eyes went wide. But she didn’t leave; she kept staring toward the horizon.)

  We’re mostly quiet now. She mends ripped canvas, rereads my father’s book, stands on the hillside with the salt-sweet wind drying the tear tracks on her face.

  I write. I wait. I think of you.

  There is a sail rising on the horizon now, like a sharp-toothed moon. Its blessings are crooked and rough-looking, as if sewn in a wild hurry by someone unskilled with needle and thread.

  It’s only as the ship grows larger that I realize: I don’t need these blessings translated. I can read them myself, in plainest English: To home. To true love. To Adelaide.

  I can see—can I? Am I imagining it?—the sun-silhouetted figure of a single sailor standing in the prow. He leans toward the city, toward the stone house on the hillside, toward his heart’s desire.

  Oh, Father. You’re home.

  And now: I curl in the belly of The Key, writing by the silver-tongued light of the full, foreign moon. The wood smells of cloves and tannin and juniper wine. It smells of sunsets on strange horizons, of nameless constellations and spinning compass needles and the forgotten borderlands at the edge of the world. It can’t be entirely coincidental that my mother’s ship smells just like my father’s book.

  Well, I suppose it’s not my mother’s ship anymore, is it? She gave it to Bad and me. “It deserves a good last run, I figure,” she’d said, and smiled in a crookedy, sad sort of way. My father’s arm had tightened around her shoulders and the smile had righted itself like a gull pulling up from a dive, soaring sunward.

  They’d both looked so young as I sailed away from them.

  They’d wanted me to stay, of course, but I couldn’t. Partly—and you’re forbidden from ever telling them this—it’s because standing beside my parents is not dissimilar from standing beside an open blast furnace. When I turn away from them my cheeks feel raw and sunburnt, and my eyes sting as though I’ve been staring directly at the sun.

  It’s been like that since the moment my father stepped off his ship. Bad and I were still making our slow, limping way down the stone streets, sweat-sticky in the afternoon heat; my mother was already on the pier, bare feet slap-slap-slapping over the boards, hair running like a pennant behind her. A dark figure stumbled toward her wearing a familiar shapeless coat, his arms upraised and his hands wrapped in rough bandaging. They moved as if drawn together by physical law, like two stars hurtling toward collision—and then my father staggered to a halt.

  He was feet away from my mother. He leaned toward her, raised one rag-wrapped hand to hover above the curve of her cheek, but did not touch her.

  I’d stopped moving, watching them from a hundred yards away, hissing go-go-go under my breath.

  But my father was for some reason resisting the thing that had kept him in desperate motion for seventeen years, that’d dragged him through ten thousand worlds and finally brought him here, standing in the City of Nin in 1911 by my reckoning, or 6938 by his, looking into his true love’s summer-sky eyes. It was as if his own heart had split in two and gone to war against itself.

  He curled his hand away from my mother’s face. His head bowed forward and his lips moved. I couldn’t hear the words, but later my mother told me what he said: I left her. I left our daughter behind.

  I watched my mother’s spine straighten, her head tilt to one side. Yes, she told him. And if you thought you could come crawling back to me without our baby girl and everything would be all right—son, you got another think coming.

  His head fell further, his poor, burnt hands hanging hopeless at his sides.

  Then my mother smiled, and I could almost feel the blazing pride of it from where I stood. Luckily for you, she said, our kid took matters into her own hands.

  He didn’t understand, of course. But it was at that moment that Bad came limping into view. I saw my father see him, saw him freeze, like a man who has just encountered a mathematical impossibility and is struggling to understand how two plus two is suddenly five. Then he looked up, up—his face lit with luminous, wild hope—

  He saw me.

  And then he collapsed onto the pier, weeping. My mother knelt beside him, circled his heaving shoulders with the same strong, sunburnt arms she’d wrapped around me that first night, and pressed her forehead against his.

  Probably it was only in my head that a silent thunderclap rolled out over the waves, that everyone in the streets of the City of Nin paused in their work and stood, looking toward the shore, and felt their hearts thrum in their chests. Probably.

  But it’s my story to tell, now, isn’t it?

  I’ve gotten sort of good at storytelling, I think. When I finally told my father my own story, he watched me with such intensity he must’ve forgotten to blink, because tears kept creeping down the side of his nose and dripping, silently, onto the floor.

  He didn’t say anything when I finished, but only reached out to trace the words carved into my arm. His face, which was still thin and hungry-looking despite days of my mother’s awful cooking, was racked with guilt.

  “Stop that,” I ordered him.

  He blinked at me. “Stop—?”

  “I won, see. I escaped Brattleboro and Havemeyer and Ilvane, I survived Mr. Locke—” My father interrupted with expletives in several languages, and some rather violent-sounding hopes for Locke’s eternal afterlife. “Hush, that’s not the point. The point is that I was scared and hurt and alone sometimes, but in the end I won. I’m… free. And if that’s the price for being free, I’ll pay it.” I paused, feeling a little dramatic. “And I’d like to go on paying it.”

  My father stared into my face for several inscrutable seconds, then looked past me to my mother. Something annoyingly telepathic slipped between them, and then he said, softly, “I shouldn’t be proud, because I did not raise you—but I am.” The mended thing in my chest purred.

  They didn’t try too hard to stop me from leaving, after that. Well, they had their concerns (my father and grandmother begged me to stay and apprentice to a real word-worker, on the grounds that I’d done impossible, powerful things with my words and ought to be properly instructed; I argued that it’s much easier to break the rules of reality when you don’t know exactly what they are, and anyway I was through with studies and lessons), but they didn’t try to lock me up. Instead, they gave me everything I needed to do what I was going to do. Even though it was dangerous, and scary, and perhaps a little mad.

  My grandmother gave me several dozen flat honey cakes she baked herself, and offered to hide my scars beneath tattoos, if I liked. I considered it, tracing the raised white lines of the words in my flesh (SHE WRITES A DOOR OF BLOOD AND SILVER. THE DOOR OPENS JUST FOR HER), and shook my head. Then I asked if she could tattoo around the scars without covering them up, and now there are wandering tendrils of words sliding up my arm, weaving between the white-cut letters like black vines. January Wordworker, daughter of Adelaide Lee Larson and Yule Ian Scholar, born in the City of Nin and bound for the In-Between. May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.

  My mother gave me The Key and three solid weeks of sailing lessons. Father tried briefly to argue that, as the more experienced sailor, he ought to teach me, but my mother just looked at him in this flat, square-jawed way, and said, “Not anymore, Juli
an,” and he went very quiet and did not interrupt again.

  My father gave me a book titled Tales of the Amarico Sea. It’s written in a language I don’t speak, with an alphabet I don’t recognize, but he seems to think languages are things one just “picks up,” like milk at the store. He also gave me his shapeless, patched coat, which used to be my mother’s, because it’d kept him warm in faraway places and always seen him safely home, and perhaps it would do the same for me. Besides, he said, he was through with wandering now.

  “And, January”—his voice was strained and thin, as if it were coming from a long way away—“I’m sorry. For leaving you all those times, and for leaving you the last time. I t-tried to turn back, at the last, I l-love—” He stopped, tear-choked, his eyes closed in shame.

  I didn’t say It’s all right, or I forgive you, because I wasn’t sure it was or I did. Instead I said simply, “I know.”

  And I fell into him the way I had as a very small girl when he returned from his trips abroad, the way I hadn’t when I was seven. We stayed that way for a while, my face smeared against his chest, his arms tight around me, until I pulled back.

  I scrubbed my cheeks. “Anyway, I won’t be gone forever. I’ll visit. It’s your turn to wait.”

  The rest of my family (see that scrolled f, like a leaf unfurling in the sunlight?) together gave me food, fresh water in clay casks, charts of the Amarico, a compass that pointed reliably north, a set of new clothes sewn from sailcloth into very rough approximations of pants and shirts by seamstresses who’d never actually seen them in real life. They’re odd, in-between sorts of clothes, a perfect patchwork of two worlds; I think they suit me rather well.

  I intend, after all, to spend the rest of my life diving in and out of the wild in-between—finding the thin, overlooked places that connect worlds, following the trail of locked Doors the Society left behind and writing them back open. Letting all the dangerous, beautiful madness flow freely between worlds again. Forging myself into a living key and opening the Doors, just like my father said.

  (This is the second reason I couldn’t stay in Nin with my parents, of course.)

  You can guess, I bet, which Door I’m opening first: the mountain door my mother sailed through in 1893, that Mr. Locke destroyed in 1895; the Door that shattered my little family into pieces and sent us careening alone into the fearful darkness. It’s an old wrong that ought to be righted, and a far enough journey that I might finish this damn book in time. (Who knew writing a story would be so much work? I have a newfound respect for all those maligned dime novelists and romance writers.)

  You’re wondering why I’ve written it at all. Why I’m here, hunched over a sheaf of moonlit papers with my hand cramping and nothing but my dog and the wide silvery shadow of the ocean for company, writing as if my very soul depends on it. Maybe it’s a family compulsion.

  Maybe it’s simple fear. Fear that I might fail in my lofty purposes and leave no record behind me. The Society, after all, is an organization of very powerful and very dangerous beings who have crept through the cracks in our world, all of whom very much want the Doors to remain closed. And it would be foolish to suppose that our world has been the only one to attract such creatures or ignite such ideas. In my nightmares I’m in an endless carnival hall filled with Havemeyers, reaching their white hands toward me through a thousand mirrors; in my really bad nightmares the mirrors are filled with pale eyes, and I can feel my will unspooling inside me.

  It’s dangerous, is what I’m saying. So I’ve written this story as a sort of extended insurance policy in case I screw up.

  If you’re some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance—perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty traveling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction—I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

  But that’s not really why I wrote this, of course.

  I wrote it for you. So that you might read it and remember the things you were told to forget.

  You remember me now, don’t you? And you remember the offer you made me?

  Well. Now at least you can look clear-eyed into your own future, and choose: stay safe and sane at home, as any rational man would—I swear I’ll understand—

  Or run away with me toward the glimmering, mad horizon. Dance through this eternal green orchard, where ten thousand worlds hang ripe and red for the plucking; wander with me between the trees, tending them, clearing away the weeds, letting in the air.

  Opening the Doors.

  Epilogue

  The Door in the Mist

  It is late October. Jagged lines of frost creep and bloom in every windowpane, and steam wisps from the lake; winter in Vermont is an impatient thing.

  It is dawn, and a young man is loading sacks of Washington Mills Peerless White Flour into a truck. The truck is glossy black, with curlicued golden lettering painted on the side. The young man is dark and solemn-eyed. He pulls his cap low against the chill, mist pearling against the back of his neck.

  He works in the comfortable rhythm of someone familiar with hard work, but there are faint, unhappy lines gathered around his mouth. The lines are fresh-seeming, as if they’ve only recently arrived and aren’t certain how to behave. They age him.

  His family attributes the lines to a slow recovery from his illness over the summer. One night at the end of July he simply vanished—after some very odd behavior and an urgent conversation with that African woman from Locke House—and staggered back home nearly two weeks later, disoriented and senseless. He didn’t seem to recall where he’d been or why, and the doctor (actually the horse doctor, who prescribed more stringent tonics at half the price) speculated that a bad fever might have boiled his brain, and recommended purgatives and time.

  Time has helped, some. The dizzy confusion of July dissipated into a vague uncertainty, a slight cloudiness in his eyes, and a tendency to stare out at the horizon as if he were hoping something or someone might appear there. Even his beloved story papers can’t hold his attention for long. His family supposes it will fade, eventually, and Samuel himself hopes the ache in his chest will fade, too, and the nagging sense that he’s lost something very dear to him but can’t recall what it was.

  Three weeks previously something happened that made it worse: A woman had approached him as he made his delivery to Shelburne Inn. She was obviously foreign, black as oil, and far too familiar for someone so strange. She said a lot of things that made no sense to him—or rather, they did but then didn’t, as if the words were sagging and sloughing away in his mind, and he could almost hear a voice saying Forget it all, boy—and eventually she grew irritated with him.

  She had pressed a slip of paper into his hand with an address scrawled in red ink, and whispered, “Just in case.”

  “In case what, ma’am?” he’d asked.

  “In case you remember.” She had sighed, and something in the sigh made him wonder if she had a hole in her heart, too. “Or in case you see her again.” And she was gone.

  Since then he has felt the ache in his chest like an open window in winter.

  It is worse on mornings like this one, when he is alone and the crows’ cries are brittle and cold. He thinks, for no reason at all, of the gray ponies he drove as a boy, of rattling down the drive to Locke House and looking up at the third-story window hoping to see—he does not recall what he hoped to see. He tries to think only about delivery routes and flour, and how best to position the busted sack so it won’t spill.

  Movement startles him. Two figures have emerged, rather suddenly, from the mist at the end of the cobbled alley. A dog, heavy-jawed and deep gold, and a young woman.

  She is tall and brownish, and her hair is braided and c
oiled in a fashion he has never seen before. She is dressed like some combination of vagabond and debutante—a fine blue skirt fastened with pearl buttons, a leather belt slung low over her hips, a shapeless coat that looks several centuries older than she is. She limps, just slightly; so does the dog.

  The dog barks at him, joyfully, and Samuel becomes aware that he is staring. He flicks his eyes sternly back to the flour sacks. But there is something about her, isn’t there, a sort of glow, like light shining around a closed door—

  He imagines her wearing a champagne-colored gown, dripping pearls, surrounded by the bustle and swirl of a fancy party. She looks very unhappy in this imagining, like something caged.

  She does not look unhappy now; indeed, she is beaming, her smile shining bonfire-bright and a little wild. It takes him a moment to realize she has stopped walking, and the smile is for him.

  “Hello, Samuel,” she says, and her voice is like a knock at that closed door.

  “Ma’am,” he answers. He knows at once it was the wrong thing to say, because her bonfire-smile dims a little. The dog is unconcerned; he shimmies up to Samuel as if they are old friends.

  The woman’s smile is sad, but her voice is steady. “I have something for you, Mr. Zappia.” She produces from her coat a fat bundle of papers tied with what appears to be brown string, a rag, and a strand of fencing wire. “Sorry about the mess—I wasn’t patient enough to get it printed and bound.”

  Samuel takes the pile of paper, because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. He notices as he does so that her left wrist is a labyrinth of ink and scars.

  “I know this must all seem very strange to you, but please just read it. As a sort of favor to me, although I guess that doesn’t mean much anymore.” The woman huffs an almost-laugh. “Read it anyway. And when you’re done, come find me. You know—you still remember where Locke House is, don’t you?”