The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  “That’s how it went down,” Pete agreed.

  “Look at her neck,” Parvesh told Officer Brophy, “if you don’t believe us.”

  “I didn’t touch her,” Marc yelled. “They’re lying. She just went for me!”

  Officer Brophy ignored Marc while she took up Parvesh’s invitation. She walked across to Liz and leaned in close to look at her bare throat. “Could you tilt your chin up a little, ma’am?” she asked politely. “If it doesn’t hurt too much.”

  Liz obeyed. Officer Lowenthal whistled, short and low. “Nasty,” he murmured.

  “How’s the gentleman looking?” Brophy asked the paramedic. She shot Marc a very brief glance.

  “He’ll need stitches,” the paramedic said. “They both will.”

  “You just got the one ambulance?”

  “Yeah. The other one is out in Wilkinsburg.”

  “Okay, then you take him. Officer Lowenthal will accompany you, and I’ll follow on with Mrs. Kendall. Len, you ought to cuff him to a gurney in case he gets argumentative.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lowenthal said.

  “This is insane!” Marc raged. “Look at me! I’m the one who’s injured. I’m the one who was attacked.” He swatted away the paramedic’s hands and pulled the dressing pad away to display his wounds. The eye looked fine, if a little red. The semi-circular gouge made by the bottle ringed it quite neatly, but there was a strip of loose flesh hanging down from his cheek as though Liz had tried to peel him.

  “That does look pretty bad,” Officer Lowenthal allowed. “You just hit him the once, ma’am?”

  “Once,” Liz agreed. “Yes.” And hey, she thought but didn’t say, that’s a one in my column and a couple of hundred in his, so he’ll probably still win the match on points even if he doesn’t get a knockout.

  She shook her head to clear it. It didn’t clear. “Please,” she tried again. “My children. I can’t leave them on their own. I haven’t even seen them yet. They don’t know what’s happening.”

  The two cops got into a murmured conversation that Liz couldn’t catch.

  “Well, you go on in and talk to them,” Brophy said eventually. “While we get your husband’s statement.” Ex-husband, Liz amended in her mind. Took the best part of two years to get that ex nailed on the front, and nobody ever uses it. “They can ride with you to the hospital, if you want. Or if you’ve got friends who can look after them…”

  “We’d be happy to do that,” Parvesh said.

  “… then they can stay here until you get back. Up to you. You go ahead and talk to them now while we finish up in here.”

  “I’m making a lasagna,” Pete said to Liz, touching her arm as she went by. “If they haven’t had supper, they can eat with us.”

  Liz gave him a weak smile, grateful but almost too far out of herself to show it. “Thanks, Pete.”

  “I was attacked with a bottle!” Marc said again, holding fast to this elemental truth. “She shoved a bottle in my face!”

  “You told us that,” Officer Lowenthal said. “But she missed the eye. You got lucky there.”

  “I’m filing charges. For criminal assault!”

  “Okay,” Brophy said. “We’re listening, sir. Tell us what happened.”

  Liz got out of there. She didn’t want to hear a version of the story where she was the monster and Marc was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The trouble was, if she told the truth she had to admit that there had been a monster in that kitchen. She had no idea where it had come from, or where it had gone when it left her.

  If.

  If it had left her.

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  THE GAMESHOUSE

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  THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY

  by

  Alix E. Harrow

  In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

  Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

  The Blue Door

  When I was seven, I found a door. I suspect I should capitalize that word, so you understand I’m not talking about your garden- or common-variety door that leads reliably to a white-tiled kitchen or a bedroom closet.

  When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can’t see the scars that twist and knot across my skin. You don’t even know my name (it’s January Scaller; so now I suppose you do know a little something about me and I’ve ruined my point).

  But you know what it means when you see the word Door. Maybe you’ve even seen one for yourself, standing half-ajar and rotted in an old church, or oiled and shining in a brick wall. Maybe, if you’re one of those fanciful persons who find their feet running toward unexpected places, you’ve even walked through one and found yourself in a very unexpected place indeed.

  Or maybe you’ve never so much as glimpsed a Door in your life. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be.

  But you still know about Doors, don’t you? Because there are ten thousand stories about ten thousand Doors, and we know them as well as we know our names. They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis and Lemuria, Heaven and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never take you, to elsewhere. My father—who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

  He never capitalized doors. But perhaps scholars don’t capitalize words just because of the shapes they make on the page.

  It was the summer of 1901, although the arrangement of four numbers on a page didn’t mean much to me then. I think of it now as a swaggering, full-of-itself sort of year, shining with the gold-plated promises of a new century. It had shed all the mess and fuss of the nineteenth century—all those wars and revolutions and uncertainties, all those imperial growing pains—and now there was nothing but promise and prosperity wherever one looked. Mr. J. P. Morgan had recently become the richest man in the entire history of the world; Queen Victoria had finally expired and left her vast empire to her kingly-looking son; those unruly Boxers had been subdued in China; and Cuba had been tucked neatly beneath America’s civilized wing. Reason and rationality reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery.

  There was no room, it turned out, for little girls who wandered off the edge of the map and told the truth about the mad, impossible things they found there.

  I found it on the raggedy western edge of Kentucky, right where the state dips its toe into the Mississippi. It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to find anything mysterious or even mildly interesting: it’s flat and scrubby-looking, populated by flat, scrubby-looking people. The sun hangs twice as hot and three times as bright as it does in the rest of the country, even at the very end of August, and everything feels damp and sticky, like the soap scum left on your skin when you’re the last one to use the bath.

  But Doors, like murder suspects in cheap mysteries, are often where you least expect them.

  I was only in Kentucky at all
because Mr. Locke had taken me along on one of his business trips. He said it was a “real treat” and a “chance to see how things are done,” but really it was because my nursemaid was teetering on the edge of hysteria and had threatened to quit at least four times in the last month. I was a difficult child, back then.

  Or maybe it was because Mr. Locke was trying to cheer me up. A postcard had arrived last week from my father. It had a picture of a brown girl wearing a pointy gold hat and a resentful expression, with the words AUTHENTIC BURMESE COSTUME stamped alongside her. On the back were three lines in tidy brown ink: Extending my stay, back in October. Thinking of you. JS. Mr. Locke had read it over my shoulder and patted my arm in a clumsy, keep-your-chin-up sort of way.

  A week later I was stuffed in the velvet and wood-paneled coffin of a Pullman sleeper car reading The Rover Boys in the Jungle while Mr. Locke read the business section of the Times and Mr. Stirling stared into space with a valet’s professional blankness.

  I ought to introduce Mr. Locke properly; he’d hate to wander into the story in such a casual, slantwise way. Allow me to present Mr. William Cornelius Locke, self-made not-quite-billionaire, head of W. C. Locke & Co., owner of no less than three stately homes along the Eastern Seaboard, proponent of the virtues of Order and Propriety (words that he certainly would prefer to see capitalized—see that P, like a woman with her hand on her hip?), and chairman of the New England Archaeological Society, a sort of social club for rich, powerful men who were also amateur collectors. I say “amateur” only because it was fashionable for wealthy men to refer to their passions in this dismissive way, with a little flick of their fingers, as if admitting to a profession other than moneymaking might sully their reputations.

  In truth, I sometimes suspected that all Locke’s moneymaking was specifically designed to fuel his collecting hobby. His home in Vermont—the one we actually lived in, as opposed to the two other pristine structures intended mainly to impress his significance upon the world—was a vast, private Smithsonian packed so tightly it seemed to be constructed of artifacts rather than mortar and stones. There was little organization: limestone figures of wide-hipped women kept company with Indonesian screens carved like lace, and obsidian arrowheads shared a glass case with the taxidermied arm of an Edo warrior (I hated that arm but couldn’t stop looking at it, wondering what it had looked like alive and muscled, how its owner would have felt about a little girl in America looking at his paper-dry flesh without even knowing his name).

  My father was one of Mr. Locke’s field agents, hired when I was nothing but an eggplant-sized bundle wrapped in an old traveling coat. “Your mother had just died, you know, very sad case,” Mr. Locke liked to recite to me, “and there was your father—this odd-colored, scarecrow-looking fellow with God-help-him tattoos up and down his arms—in the absolute middle of nowhere with a baby. I said to myself: Cornelius, there’s a man in need of a little charity!”

  Father was hired before dusk. Now he gallivants around the world collecting objects “of particular unique value” and mailing them to Mr. Locke so he can put them in glass cases with brass plaques and shout at me when I touch them or play with them or steal the Aztec coins to re-create scenes from Treasure Island. And I stay in my little gray room in Locke House and harass the nursemaids Locke hires to civilize me and wait for Father to come home.

  At seven, I’d spent considerably more time with Mr. Locke than with my own biological father and, insofar as it was possible to love someone so naturally comfortable in three-piece suits, I loved him.

  As was his custom, Mr. Locke had taken rooms for us in the nicest establishment available; in Kentucky, that translated to a sprawling pinewood hotel on the edge of the Mississippi, clearly built by someone who wanted to open a grand hotel but hadn’t ever met one in real life. There were candy-striped wallpaper and electric chandeliers, but a sour catfish smell seeped up from the floorboards.

  Mr. Locke waved past the manager with a fly-swatting gesture, told him to “Keep an eye on the girl, that’s a good fellow,” and swept into the lobby with Mr. Stirling trailing like a man-shaped dog at his heels. Locke greeted a bow-tied man waiting on one of the flowery couches. “Governor Dockery, a pleasure! I read your last missive with greatest attention, I assure you—and how is your cranium collection coming?”

  Ah. So that was why we came: Mr. Locke was meeting one of his Archaeological Society pals for an evening of drinking, cigar smoking, and boasting. They had an annual Society meeting every summer at Locke House—a fancy party followed by a stuffy, members-only affair that neither I nor my father was permitted to attend—but some of the real enthusiasts couldn’t wait the full year and sought one another out wherever they could.

  The manager smiled at me in that forced, panicky way of childless adults, and I smiled toothily back. “I’m going out,” I told him confidently. He smiled a little harder, blinking with uncertainty. People are always uncertain about me: my skin is sort of coppery-red, as if it’s covered all over with cedar sawdust, but my eyes are round and light and my clothes are expensive. Was I a pampered pet or a serving girl? Should the poor manager serve me tea or toss me in the kitchens with the maids? I was what Mr. Locke called “an in-between sort of thing.”

  I tipped over a tall vase of flowers, gasped an insincere “oh dear,” and slunk away while the manager swore and mopped at the mess with his coat. I escaped outdoors (see how that word slips into even the most mundane of stories? Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges).

  The streets were nothing but sunbaked stripes crisscrossing themselves before they ended in the muddy river, but the people of Ninley, Kentucky, seemed inclined to stroll along them as if they were proper city streets. They stared and muttered as I went by.

  An idle dockworker pointed and nudged his companion. “That’s a little Chickasaw girl, I’ll bet you.” His workmate shook his head, citing his extensive personal experience with Indian girls, and speculated, “West Indian, maybe. Or a half-breed.”

  I kept walking. People were always guessing like that, categorizing me as one thing or another, but Mr. Locke assured me they were all equally incorrect. “A perfectly unique specimen,” he called me. Once after a comment from one of the maids I’d asked him if I was colored and he’d snorted. “Odd-colored, perhaps, but hardly colored.” I didn’t really know what made a person colored or not, but the way he said it made me glad I wasn’t.

  The speculating was worse when my father was with me. His skin is darker than mine, a lustrous red-black, and his eyes are so black even the whites are threaded with brown. Once you factor in the tattoos—ink spirals twisting up both wrists—and the shabby suit and the spectacles and the muddled-up accent and—well. People stared.

  I still wished he were with me.

  I was so busy walking and not looking back at all those white faces that I thudded into someone. “Sorry, ma’am, I—” An old woman, hunched and seamed like a pale walnut, glared down at me. It was a practiced, grandmotherly glare, especially made for children who moved too fast and knocked into her. “Sorry,” I said again.

  She didn’t answer, but something shifted in her eyes like a chasm cleaving open. Her mouth hung open, and her filmy eyes went wide as shutters. “Who—just who the hell are you?” she hissed at me. People don’t like in-between things, I suppose.

  I should have scurried back to the catfish-smelling hotel and huddled in Mr. Locke’s safe, moneyed shadow, where none of these damn people could reach me; it would have been the proper thing to do. But, as Mr. Locke so often complained, I could sometimes be quite improper, willful, and temerarious (a word I assumed was unflattering from the company it kept).

  So I ran away.

  I ran until my stick-thin legs shook and my chest heaved against the fine seams of my dress. I ran until the street turned to a winding lane and the buildings behind me were swallowed up by wisteria and honeysuckle. I ran and tried not to th
ink about the old woman’s eyes on my face, or how much trouble I would be in for disappearing.

  My feet stopped their churning only once they realized the dirt beneath them had turned to laid-over grasses. I found myself in a lonely, overgrown field beneath a sky so blue it reminded me of the tiles my father brought back from Persia: a majestic, world-swallowing blue you could fall into. Tall, rust-colored grasses rolled beneath it, and a few scattered cedars spiraled up toward it.

  Something in the shape of the scene—the rich smell of dry cedar in the sun, the grass swaying against the sky like a tigress in orange and blue—made me want to curl into the dry stems like a fawn waiting for her mother. I waded deeper, wandering, letting my hands trail through the frilled tops of wild grains.

  I almost didn’t notice the Door at all. All Doors are like that, half-shadowed and sideways until someone looks at them in just the right way.

  This one was nothing but an old timber frame arranged in a shape like the start of a house of cards. Rust stains spotted the wood where hinges and nails had bled into nothing, and only a few brave planks remained of the door itself. Flaking paint still clung to it, the same royal blue as the sky.

  Now, I didn’t know about Doors at the time, and wouldn’t have believed you even if you’d handed me an annotated three-volume collection of eyewitness reports. But when I saw that raggedy blue door standing so lonesome in the field, I wanted it to lead someplace else. Someplace other than Ninley, Kentucky, someplace new and unseen and so vast I would never come to the end of it.