The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  The Gatekeeper looked at the door and shook her head. “Not quite as grand as I’d expected,” she said. “And no gatekeeper? The skin crawls to think of it.”

  “It’s a secret worldgate,” I reminded her.

  “Not for much longer,” said Rosemary darkly. “If we don’t get back home before Mrs. Bracknell’s announcement, we might run into a wave of tourists on the other side of the door.”

  “Better than a wave of people with nets!” said Arthur.

  He had a good point. Even with the royal sentries, the Gatekeeper, Mr. Wilson, and the Daves by our side, I wasn’t sure what we’d find when we opened the worldgate, or whether we’d all be able to escape from whatever it was. The Gatekeeper didn’t seem concerned, though. She blew on her hands to warm them—it was snowing again—and ran her fingers along the cracks in the wall until she’d pried the door open. “Nets or not,” she said, “I want to go home, and Clara Bracknell and her officers won’t stop me.” She stepped through the doorway. “Well? Are the rest of you coming?”

  30

  There was no one waiting in the eighth-floor hallway. Not travel officers with nets, or Mrs. Bracknell with some unpleasant otherworld weapon. Even Michael was nowhere in sight. I stood in the middle of the hall, looking from one end to the other, but the whole place was empty. No one leaped out at us or tried to have us arrested.

  Rosemary blinked as she came through the worldgate. “Where is everybody?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” I said. In the dim light, I was starting to notice that other things had changed, too. The floor had been swept. The piece of construction tape I’d left outside the Northwestern door was gone. As a matter of fact, all the construction tape was gone, and so were the combination locks on the worldgates. More quilts hung on the walls between them, and above each door, someone had affixed metal labels engraved in tasteful script. The one over the door we’d just walked through said East. Directly across from us, lying on its side and waiting to be hung, was a much larger sign. Welcome to Southeast, it said. Center of the Worlds. When the Gatekeeper saw it, she snorted.

  Mr. Wilson had lingered on the Eastern side of the door to study the fraying fabric around its edges. Now he hurried through the worldgate, looking angry. “They’ve rushed the work, and it shows,” he said. “If someone tugged at one of those threads hard enough, they could start pulling the worlds apart.” He opened the Northern doorway and glanced at the damage Kip had done during our scuffle, shaking his head. “Get a message to as many of the other Interworld Travel offices as you can,” he said to the Daves. “They’re going to want to take a look at this place. But tell them to be careful, or they’ll tear up the worlds.”

  All the Daves nodded. Each one disappeared through a different worldgate.

  “The rest of you,” said Mr. Wilson, “need to take me to Mrs. Bracknell.” He rolled up the sleeves of his sweater. “Quickly.”

  With the bees in the lead, we wound our way down the staircase. Somewhere between the sixth floor and the fifth, rounds of applause started to swell up from the lobby. “What time did your pa say Mrs. Bracknell was going to make her special announcement?” I asked Rosemary.

  “Six o’clock.” Rosemary glanced at her watch. “Oh, worlds. It’s ten past six. That’s why none of the travel officers were waiting to meet us. Everyone in Centerbury is supposed to be in that lobby.”

  “Then they’ll all hear what we’ve got to say.” I was starting to get dizzy from going around and around the staircase, and the applause was getting louder by the minute, but I tried not to pay attention to any of that. At the end of the world, it’s important to stay as calm as possible.

  Not that you’d know it from talking to the bees. HURRY! they said, zooming down the staircase and flying back up to urge us on. HURRY! And then, suddenly: STOP!

  I did. Rosemary, Arthur, the Gatekeeper, and Mr. Wilson all staggered to a halt behind me. Below us, only a few steps away, was the lobby of the Interworld Travel building. Even on its busiest days, I’d never seen the room so full of people. The crowd covered every inch of the marble floor and flowed out into the street; if Mr. Silos was in there somewhere, or if my own parents were, I couldn’t pick them out. I could see Thomas, though. He was standing in a long line of gray-suited travel officers right at the front of the crowd. Kip and Celeste were there, too, to my dismay, looking just as though no one had ever tried to push them into the sea. I recognized a few of the others who’d chased us into East, and I didn’t have to look very hard to find Michael: while the officers on either side of him were scratching their necks or trying not to yawn, he was standing at attention and looking as proud as if he was the head of Interworld Travel himself.

  Mrs. Bracknell stood with her back to us at a lectern that someone had set up on the wide staircase landing. If the bees hadn’t told me to stop, I’d have crashed straight into her. She must not have heard us over the applause, though, because she didn’t seem to know we were standing behind her. In fact, I wasn’t sure anyone had noticed us yet. Most people’s gazes were glued to Mrs. Bracknell, and anyone who wasn’t watching her was staring up at the sculpture of the eight worlds. The beams of light that joined the glass spheres together had gotten brighter since I’d seen them last, and all of them radiated from the golden-green Southeastern globe. Once you’d seen it, it was hard to look away.

  “In a matter of days, the Southeast Worldhub will be fully operational,” Mrs. Bracknell was saying to the crowd. “Our old worldgates may never be repaired, but misfortune can open the door to new possibilities, if you’ll forgive the expression, and I’m proud of my team for coming up with an ingenious solution to our interworld crisis. They’ve been hard at work since the moment our first worldgate was sealed, developing the technology to open new pathways between the worlds in a convenient central location. For hundreds of years, travelers have had to cross enormous distances to get from one world to the next. They’ve had to endure dangerous weather conditions, cope with unpredictable circumstances, and submit to frustrating regulations that turn travel from a pleasure into a chore.”

  “Ha!” The Gatekeeper nudged me. “She’s talking about us.”

  “But now?” Mrs. Bracknell waved her hand. “Interworld travel will be as simple as taking a few steps down the hall. While we can’t completely eliminate the side effects of placing several worldgates in one location, our engineers have developed a unique insulation material that should protect us all from danger and disruption.”

  Arthur shot me a questioning look. “Those enormous quilts, I think,” I whispered.

  “And with one central checkpoint run by experienced travel officers, we’ll be able to cut down on time-consuming paperwork and expensive staff. Our whole organization mourns the loss of our beloved gatekeepers, and we’ll continue trying to find out what’s happened to them, but we can’t deny any longer that gatekeeping itself has become a relic of an outdated system.”

  “Relic?” The Gatekeeper had heard enough. With her hair all afrizz and her cloak swooping behind her more witchily than ever, she stomped up to the lectern and whacked it with her cane. “I’m no relic, Clara Bracknell, and you’d better take care to remember it!”

  The crowd stopped clapping and started murmuring instead. Mrs. Bracknell stepped away from the lectern and spent a good long while staring at the Gatekeeper. “I thought you were gone!” she said loud enough for all of us to hear it. “They were supposed to make sure—” She stopped midsentence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, returning to the lectern, “I’m sorry for the interruption, but it seems we’ve had an unexpected stroke of good fortune. One of our missing gatekeepers has returned to us.”

  “No thanks to you!” said the Gatekeeper. She faced the crowd and waved her cane in Mrs. Bracknell’s direction. “This woman is the one who made sure we all went missing in the first place!”

  Michael was already halfway up the stairs. “You all!” he shouted, catching sight of us. “What do you think you’re do
ing here?”

  Mrs. Bracknell wheeled around to look where Michael was pointing. If the expression on her face was any guide, she wasn’t too pleased with what she saw. The murmurs in the crowd had grown to a low roar now, and I could hear snippets of conversation here and there: “Who’s the witch with the stick?” and “Aren’t those the criminals? The ones who sealed the worldgates?” and “He doesn’t look much like a prince.” In the long row of travel officers, Thomas stood frozen, staring straight at me.

  “Excuse me, everyone!” I said, but no one seemed to notice. I could barely hear my own voice over the noise of the crowd. Shout, I told myself. Scream. Make a general ruckus. You’ve got two strong lungs, and you know how to use them.

  “Hey!” I hollered as loudly as I could. “Pay attention!”

  That seemed to do the trick.

  “We’re not criminals,” I called out. “We didn’t seal any worldgates at all. Mrs. Bracknell did that—or at least her officers did. She’s not solving your problems; she’s the one who caused them!”

  “You tell ’em, Lucy!” Mr. Silos shouted from somewhere in the back of the crowd.

  Mrs. Bracknell and Michael strode toward us, with a growing gaggle of travel officers close behind them and the Gatekeeper still trying to trip everyone with her cane. “Lower your voice, please,” Mrs. Bracknell snapped at me, “or you’ll wish that thistle-backed thrunt had eaten you days ago.”

  “Excuse me, Clara,” said Mr. Wilson, stepping forward. “I hate to interrupt, but threatening our patrons with carnivorous beasts is a serious breach of protocol.”

  Mrs. Bracknell blinked at him. “Claude Wilson?” she said. “From East?”

  “I can have him arrested if you’d like,” Michael offered.

  “No, don’t do that. He’s the head of the Eastern commission.” Mrs. Bracknell looked at Mr. Wilson with his rolled-up sweater sleeves, and then at the royal sentries who stood on either side of him. If they were at all confused by the situation they found themselves in, they were well trained enough not to show it. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Mrs. Bracknell said calmly, putting her hands in her pockets. “I’m not sure what these people have been telling you, Mr. Wilson, but I can promise you that none of it is true.”

  Mr. Wilson gave her a mild smile. “It seems accurate enough to me. Center of the Worlds, eh, Clara?”

  Mrs. Bracknell said nothing. She wasn’t blinking anymore.

  Mr. Wilson shrugged. “The heads of the other branches will be on their way soon to repair the damage you’ve done. I’m sure Josie Santos over in South will be relieved to find out where Arabella Tallard’s gatecutters have gone.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Bracknell said carefully. “As I’ve just been saying to the others, my team has developed a new technology—”

  This was when the cows came down the stairs.

  The clatter of hooves was loud enough to drown out whatever Mrs. Bracknell had planned to say. The cows were moving slowly, stepping carefully; they obviously didn’t want to trip. There must have been at least twenty of them. “I thought cows couldn’t go down stairs,” Arthur murmured as the first one stepped onto the landing and let out a long, low moo.

  “They’re Northeastern cows,” Rosemary told him. “Very talented. I guess one of the Daves left a worldgate open.”

  “Betsy! Euphemia! Fern!” shouted Huggins from somewhere in the lobby. He pushed through the crowd and climbed up to the landing. “What are you ladies doing here?” The cows trotted over to him and rubbed their heads affectionately against his stomach.

  Everyone had stopped gawking at us and started gawking at the cows instead. “What in the worlds is happening?” Mr. Wilson cried. “Where did these animals come from?” The cows were wandering through the lobby now, and Betsy or Euphemia or Fern was trying to eat his sweater. “Do they have valid passports?”

  “I’m really not sure—” Mrs. Bracknell started to say, but she was cut off again by a new wave of visitors coming down the stairs.

  These, at least, were human. In the lead was Zenna, one of the women we’d met in North. She was followed by a pack of other smugglers, only some of whom I recognized. Zenna caught sight of us and waved furiously in our direction. “We wanted to see if we could find that new worldgate you were talking about,” she called over the ruckus. “Looks like we did!”

  “Is that Mrs. Bracknell?” one of the other smugglers asked, pointing. “The one with all those travel officers behind her?”

  Mrs. Bracknell glared up at the smugglers. Even she couldn’t stay calm anymore. “You’re not allowed to be here!” she shouted. “Who let you through that worldgate? You’re all in extremely serious trouble.”

  Zenna frowned at her. “Rosemary and her friends told us all about you,” she said, “and I think you’re the one who’s in trouble.”

  From somewhere behind her, a trumpet blew. “Make way for the chief admiral!” someone bellowed. “Make way or be blasted!”

  “Oh, for worlds’ sake,” snapped Mrs. Bracknell.

  The pack of smugglers parted, and a very short man in a brass-buttoned uniform and a wide hat marched imperiously down the stairs. “I am here,” he announced, “to make a declaration of war against those who closed our worldgates! My Northern fleet will not relent until Southeast lies in ruins!”

  Mrs. Bracknell stared at him. “Has this turned into a costume party?”

  By now, the crowd in the lobby was in a frenzy. Some people were running after the cows, who were munching on decorative ferns and going around and around in the revolving doors. Others were yelling about criminals and smugglers and going to war with North. And most of the rest were jostling each other, trying to get a better view of the commotion behind the lectern. Travel officers were chasing after smugglers, smugglers were chasing after travel officers, someone in the crowd was telling the chief admiral of North that Southeast didn’t even have a sea, cows were treading on the royal sentries’ feet, and the Gatekeeper was still trying to give Mrs. Bracknell a piece of her mind.

  “If you’ve harmed the other gatekeepers,” she shouted, “if you’ve touched so much as a hair on Bernard’s useless, infuriating head—”

  “Careful!” shouted Arthur. “She’s reaching for something!”

  But the Gatekeeper didn’t hear him. “Did you really think you could fool everyone in eight entire worlds, Clara?” she asked. “When I tell them what happened to me—”

  “You won’t tell them anything!” Mrs. Bracknell shouted. She was holding something now: a gleaming pair of scissors, small and sharp. As the Gatekeeper charged toward her, Mrs. Bracknell bent over and snipped at the air down by her ankles. A gash of bright light opened up in front of her.

  The Gatekeeper fell through it.

  “Stop!” cried Mr. Wilson, too late. He reached out to grab the Gatekeeper’s cloak. But he leaned too far, or maybe he tripped, or maybe the light had a pull all its own. Whatever the truth might have been, all I knew was that within half a second, both of them had vanished.

  31

  We stared down into the light.

  “What is that?” Arthur asked.

  I shook my head. “Where is that?”

  Mrs. Bracknell didn’t move. She was still clutching the gatecutters.

  “I’ll take care of it for you, ma’am,” said Michael, running to her side. He had something in his hands, too—a bright pink tube, half rolled up. Rosemary moved toward him, but she wasn’t fast enough; with a few squeezes of the tube, he’d glued the light shut. “There you go,” he said to Mrs. Bracknell. “Good as new.” Then he looked around at all of us on the landing. The smugglers had stopped chasing the travel officers, and the travel officers had stopped chasing the smugglers. Even the cows stood still. “Whatever you think you just saw,” Michael said, “you didn’t. Is that clear?”

  In that moment, I swore I could have lifted him over my head and tossed him clear across the building. “Clear as bog
water!” I said. “What happened to the Gatekeeper? And Mr. Wilson? Where did they go?”

  Mrs. Bracknell fiddled with the gatecutters in her hands. “I don’t know, exactly,” she said, “but it’s possible . . .” She cleared her throat. “It’s possible they’re no longer in any of the eight worlds.”

  “What do you mean? What else is there?”

  Mrs. Bracknell wouldn’t answer.

  Rosemary, though, was looking at the sculpture floating above us. “There’s the space beyond the worlds,” she said, pointing. “The emptiness that’s all around us.”

  “Have you been there?” I asked her.

  Rosemary swallowed. “Lucy, I don’t think anyone’s been there.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Bracknell slowly, “that it’s possible to survive it.”

  My face felt hot with worry. “Then hurry up and bring them back! Go ahead. Use those gatecutters and open up a door to let them through.”

  Mrs. Bracknell and Michael exchanged a look. “I don’t think that would be wise,” Mrs. Bracknell said at last. “I didn’t mean to send them out of the worlds. It was an impulse; I was hasty, but I needed them gone. They wanted to shut down the worldhub we’ve all done so much to create.” She was speaking to her travel officers now, and some of the vigor had come back into her voice. “No one in the crowd will have noticed. I don’t see any reason to alarm them. It’s probably best if none of us mention the incident again.”