The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  The archives were stored in the basement, in a dim, wood-paneled room with rows of shelves that must have stretched halfway across the building. Each shelf was loaded with dusty books and boxes, and each box had a different label: Maintenance Logs East, Known Criminals A–G, Reports of Unusual Weather, Historical Documents #5. Someone had shoved a battered old desk and two folding chairs into one corner of the room, where a lamp flickered unconvincingly.

  “Here we are,” said Thomas. “Every document the Southeastern Interworld Travel Commission has ever produced is somewhere in this room. It’s all in alphabetical order, or at least it’s supposed to be. Things can get a little confusing down here.”

  “Your records aren’t digital?” Arthur poked at one of the boxes, leaving a fingerprint smudge in the dust. “Or, I don’t know, magical?”

  “I’m sorry.” At least Thomas sounded as if he meant it. “But Rosemary’s file must be here somewhere. If I were you, I’d start with the most recent box of passport records and work backward from there. If you need me, I’ll be in my office; that’s on the third floor, down the hall from Mrs. Bracknell’s. And, Goose?” Thomas bent down to look me in the eye. “Don’t leave the building alone, all right? Considering what’s happened to the other gatekeepers, you shouldn’t be wandering across Centerbury by yourself.”

  This seemed deeply unfair, but Thomas was right, as usual: I was at Interworld Travel to help find Rosemary and rescue the Gatekeeper, not to make more trouble. It was best to be cautious. “All right,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

  Thomas smiled at us on his way out the door. “Good luck, Goose. Good luck, Your Highness.”

  “Your Highness?” I hissed at Arthur once we were alone. The bees had flown deeper into the archive to search for boxes of passport applications, and Arthur was looking at the spines of old books on a shelf. I flopped down in one of the folding chairs. Its legs wobbled under me, as if it were on the verge of giving up. “What were you thinking?”

  Arthur grimaced. “Should I not be a prince? Sorry about that. I didn’t know what else to say, and Mrs. Bracknell was making me nervous.”

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “You’ll just have to remember to act princely.” I hoped Arthur had a better idea than I did of exactly what that meant. “Princes probably have lots of servants to do things for them,” I said, thinking about it, “so don’t mention that you drive your own car or make your own sandwiches or anything like that.”

  “A prince can make sandwiches!” Arthur said indignantly.

  We were interrupted by the bees, who’d found the passport files. They weren’t far away, but the shelves were stacked higher than I could reach, and the rows of boxes marked Passport Applications went on forever. At least they were numbered and more or less in order. After a few minutes of searching, I found the least dusty box—Passport Applications #8442-8570—and hauled it back to the desk in the corner of the room. The papers inside couldn’t have been stored for long; they were still crisp and white, and the first three files I pulled out had all been completed in the last few months. Each form had a picture of the applicant clipped to the top, so it was easy to tell at a glance that none of them belonged to Rosemary. I hauled an armload of papers out of the box and started flipping through them. Every so often, footsteps would pound on the lobby floor above our heads and I’d wonder whether Mrs. Bracknell’s travel officers had already found Rosemary in the time it had taken me to glance at half a dozen files. Sitting behind a desk and organizing papers into stacks wasn’t particularly exciting, but I guessed someone had to do it, and at least I had experience.

  Arthur, who was supposed to be searching through files of his own, was still wandering the aisles, peering into boxes and chatting with the bees about what he’d found inside. At one point he wandered back to the desk carrying a tall stack of books. He dumped them on the floor in front of me, sending up a dust cloud that made both of us sneeze.

  “All these books,” Arthur announced, “are about Henry Tallard. And these are just the ones I could carry.” He held up a yellowing copy of Tallard’s autobiography, Great Explorations. “Maybe there’s something in here that will tell us more about what he’s been doing at the ends of the world.”

  “The travel officers will interview him soon enough,” I said. “We’re supposed to be looking for Rosemary.”

  “I know.” Arthur frowned down at the picture of Tallard on the book’s back cover. “He really does look like he’s up to something, though, doesn’t he? Like he knows something the rest of us don’t? I can’t believe I told him all about our troubles.” He set down Great Explorations and picked up another book from the pile on the floor, a thick hardcover with a purple dust jacket and the words Tallard: A Life printed in yellow. I recognized it right away: I’d read it in school, and so had every other person in Southeast.

  “That one’s about Arabella Tallard,” I said. “She was Henry’s great-great-aunt or something like that.”

  “And she was a famous explorer, too?”

  “Better than that.” I liked Arabella Tallard, or at least I liked all the stories I’d heard about her, and growing up in a family of diplomats and governors, I’d heard a lot. “She created the worldgates.”

  Arthur sat down in the other folding chair. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, our worlds haven’t always been connected.” I set down my work. “They’ve always been right alongside each other, but for the longest time, none of the eight worlds knew the other seven existed, and you couldn’t travel from one to another. Sometimes, in the places where the fabric between the worlds was especially thin, people would hear things—a phrase of otherworld music, maybe, or the first few words of a story. If you were standing in just the right place at just the right time, you might have seen a shadow you couldn’t explain or felt a warm breeze come from out of nowhere. Those were the only things that could pass between the worlds back then: sounds and winds and light.”

  Arthur’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward. “How long ago was that?”

  “Not so long. A few hundred years. Southeast was a different kind of place back then. We couldn’t get crops from Northeast, or electric light from East, or magic from South. The whole world was very poor, and most of the other worlds weren’t much better off.”

  “Until Henry Tallard’s great-great-aunt came along?”

  I nodded. “Arabella Tallard wasn’t an explorer at first; she was an inventor. Her mother was a seamstress in South, and she was always complaining about the dull fabric shears she had to use to cut her patterns, so Arabella decided to invent a magical pair that would never lose their sharpness. She never told anyone exactly how she did it, but after a few years of experimenting, she’d created a new kind of metal that could be sharpened down to the thinnest blade and could cut through any fabric. She used it to make one pair of scissors and took them back for her mother to test. But women’s fashions weren’t very practical back then, particularly in South, and Arabella’s shoe got caught in the cobblestones outside her mother’s shop. When she reached out with her scissors to stop herself from falling, she sliced a hole right through the fabric of time and space and toppled into Southwest.”

  “She fell out of her own world accidentally?” Arthur looked delighted. “Then I’m not the only one!”

  I’d always been curious about that detail myself. It made for a good story, but Arabella Tallard had been a genius, and I thought she might have known exactly what she was doing when she’d reached out and snipped her way into another world. “Once that first worldgate was open,” I said, “Arabella became an otherworld explorer. She and her friends traveled all through the worlds, finding the places where the fabric of time and space was thinnest and using the gatecutters—the scissors she’d invented—to snip new worldgates open. They were just ragged holes at first, but those first explorers trimmed the edges and built sturdy doorways around them to keep them from unraveling. The worlds started communicating with one anoth
er, and then they started visiting and trading. The Interworld Travel Commissions were formed to keep track of it all. More people became explorers, but Arabella was the only one with gatecutters, and once she’d opened doorways to connect all the worlds, she never used them again.”

  Arthur had cracked open Tallard: A Life and was studying an illustration of Arabella in the practical explorer’s uniform she’d designed herself, complete with flat-soled shoes that would never get caught between cobblestones. “Where are the gatecutters now?” he asked. “Do you think someone could use them to open the worldgates that are sealed?”

  “I think they’re in a museum in another world somewhere. I’ve got no idea if they still work. They’re hundreds of years old, so they’re probably rusted shut anyway.” I shrugged. “It’s a good idea, though. We should ask Mrs. Bracknell about it.”

  By the time we’d looked through two full boxes of passport applications, it was past sunset. While I’d managed to lose my favorite pen somewhere in the archives, I still hadn’t found any more information about Rosemary. We lugged the boxes back to their shelves and went upstairs to see if the café was still serving dinner. Arthur chatted with the bees as we walked, but I didn’t feel like joining in; all that afternoon, I’d been thinking about Arabella Tallard and about how poor and isolated Southeast had been before she’d opened the worldgates. Now that we were shut off from all the other worlds again, what would happen to us? Would our lives start to change? Would that change take years, or months, or days? Maybe a crew of travel officers had already made it to the gatehouses, I told myself; maybe they were already working on ways to fix the doors at the ends of the world. It was just like Mrs. Bracknell had said: they were professionals. There was no reason to panic.

  As we passed the lobby, Arthur stopped walking. A crowd of people had gathered in the center of the marble floor, and everyone was staring up at the sculpture of the eight glass spheres. We stared, too. The lines of light that should have connected Southeast to East and to South still hadn’t returned, and now the light connecting East to Northeast was flickering wildly, like a trapped firebug. As we watched, there was a fizzing noise in the air, followed by a tiny pop, and the light went out completely.

  I spotted Thomas in the crowd and pushed my way through to him. “We’ve lost another worldgate, haven’t we?”

  “It looks that way.” Thomas sounded exhausted.

  “Do you think the same people who closed the other two worldgates closed that one?”

  “I don’t know, Goose. I’m a travel officer, not an all-seeing magician. I’ve got no more idea what’s going on than you do.”

  “Look!” shouted someone in the crowd, and we all looked up again. The light between Northeast and North was flickering now, too.

  “Oh, worlds,” said Thomas. “That can’t be good.”

  I nodded. It didn’t take an all-seeing magician to realize that.

  9

  News about the sealed worldgates traveled fast. We hadn’t been in the city for more than few days before all of Centerbury was humming with alarm. Diplomats, explorers, and traders were gathered around the information desk in the lobby, asking if it was true that they were stranded in our world and demanding to know what Mrs. Bracknell planned to do about it. Mrs. Bracknell herself was meeting with a steady stream of government officials, each one more panic-stricken than the last. Her travel officers reported that at both ends of the world the weather was mild and partly cloudy, and all the morning newspapers had been properly delivered. No one nearby had misplaced their glasses, their house keys, the books they’d been reading, or anything else, for that matter. And no one could figure out how to reopen the doors.

  I spent each day squirreled away in the archives, reading through thirteen years of passport applications as fast as I could. I’d found plenty of girls and women named Rosemary, but most of them looked nothing like the girl I’d met, and almost none of them were the right age. There were only three exceptions: Rosemary Weber, whose passport photo had gotten lost; Rosemary Silos, who’d been photographed when she was only a baby; and Rosemary Baker, who had a tumble of brown curls but had moved to Northwest with her family five years earlier.

  Each time I found a potential Rosemary, I ran upstairs to show Thomas, but each time, he took a quick glance at my papers and sent me away. “I’m sorry, Goose,” he said the third time, handing Rosemary Baker’s passport file back to me, “but even if this is the right Rosemary, I’m not sure how we’d find her. She doesn’t even live in this world anymore. And we don’t have any proof that this girl is the one we’re looking for.”

  “That’s what you said the last two times!”

  “That’s because it’s true.” Thomas sighed loudly and sat back down behind his desk. It was only nine in the morning, but he’d obviously been working through the night; his office was scattered with blueprints, memos, and cardboard coffee cups, and the tie I’d seen him wearing the day before was still draped around his neck.

  “I’ll find proof,” I offered. “I’ll go to Rosemary Baker’s old address and ask if anyone’s seen her, or if they remember her mentioning the worldgates. I’ll visit the other two girls, too. I’ll find another travel officer to come with me, Thomas; I know you’re busy—”

  “Very busy.” Thomas took a sip from one of his coffee cups and grimaced. “Honestly, Goose, none of us have time to worry about any of these girls. Our travel officers found Henry Tallard sneaking through the woods outside Florence’s gatehouse a few days ago, and he took off running. Now we’ve had to send more officers into the field to track him down, and the rest of us are working overtime. Five more lights are out on the sculpture, we’re trying to work out exactly how many otherworlders are stranded here, and the Northern ambassador is threatening to force our worldgates open by blasting them with cannonballs. This Rosemary business will have to wait.”

  “All right,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “You’re not a bother,” Thomas said automatically, but he’d already turned back to his work, and he didn’t look up when I went out the door.

  Arthur was down in the archives when I got back, talking to a tall, broad-shouldered man I didn’t recognize. “This is a huge honor,” the man was saying. “I’ve never met a prince before!”

  “Well, I’ve never met someone who owns quite so much livestock.” Arthur sounded genuinely impressed. “The honor’s mine, Huggins.”

  Both of them looked over at me as I tossed Rosemary Baker’s file back on the desk. “Lucy!” said Arthur. “Meet Huggins! He took a wrong turn on his way to breakfast.”

  I introduced myself and shook Huggins’s hand. “You’re the farmer from Northeast, aren’t you? The one who’s here to see Mrs. Bracknell about some cows?”

  “That’s right,” said Huggins. “It’s a bad situation, Miss Eberslee. My girls won’t go into their normal grazing pastures, won’t even walk across the field. Mrs. Bracknell needs to know about it, but she’s been so busy, she hasn’t had a chance to meet with me. If either of you happen to see her, would you pass the news along?”

  I couldn’t imagine why Mrs. Bracknell would need to know about some stubborn Northeastern cows, but I promised I’d let her know. Then Arthur left to show Huggins the way to the café, and I got to work, digging some masking tape out of a desk drawer and sticking each of the three Rosemarys’ passport applications to the wall. I stared at them. If Thomas wanted proof that one of these people was the girl I’d met at Florence’s, then proof was what I’d give him.

  But I didn’t know where to start. I was still staring at the pages on the wall when Arthur came back ten minutes later. “Do any of these girls look suspicious to you?” I asked him. “Like the sort of person who might lurk around a sealed-up worldgate?”

  “I think it’s the baby. She looks too smart for her own good.” Arthur tossed me a pear he must have snagged from the café. I bit into it gratefully; I’d skipped breakfast that morning so I could come s
traight down to the archives, and I was already regretting it. “Didn’t Thomas want to hear more about your latest Rosemary?” Arthur asked.

  “He didn’t even seem interested. And I don’t think Mrs. Bracknell cares, either. I ran into her this morning and asked her if she knew where Arabella Tallard’s gatecutters were, but she just stared at me and said she had no idea.” She’d been in a rush, to be fair, hurrying down the stairs from the eighth-floor construction zone, and she hadn’t even stopped long enough for me to tell her about all the work I’d been doing. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “The worldgates are closing faster now. Most of the lights on the sculpture are out, everyone in the world is panicking, and Mrs. Bracknell has a whole team of officers running after Henry Tallard. You’d think they’d want to track Rosemary down, too. For all we know, she’s the criminal behind it all!”

  Arthur looked up at me. “Hold on,” he said. “You’ve given me an idea.” And he vanished into the archives.

  When he didn’t come back after five minutes, I went after him myself. “Arthur?” I called as I walked. “Are you still in here?” The room was so huge and dim that it would have been easy for someone to get lost in the maze of shelves, maybe even for good. I wondered what would happen if I did get lost down here. Would Thomas send a search party? Would Mrs. Bracknell click efficiently down the aisles until she’d found me? How long would it be until either of them noticed I was missing? I shuddered. “Arthur?” I called again.

  Then I realized where I was standing. I’d wandered to one of the far corners of the archives, where all the boxes around me were labeled with dates and the same two words: Employee Records. And I had an idea of my own.