The Forbidden Doors Box Set

by Cortney Pearson

  Nikolay bends to upturn a fallen beam, the remnants so badly charred they leave black marks on his hands. Finally, he grumbles in Russian and retrieves something small, stuffing it into his pocket before I get the chance to see what it is.

  He crosses toward the house’s edge and leaps back to the snow, dusting his filthy hands on his black coat. And he gives me an apologetic look. “I’m afraid I’ve ruined your evening,” he says.

  “I need answers, Nikolay,” I say in exasperation. “If you know who’s after me, please tell me. What was it you put into your pocket?”

  He grimaces, glancing up at the darkening sky. “I would like to answer your questions, Everly, and perhaps start up where we left off in the truck.”

  My heart skips a beat. Kissing. Please tell me he means kissing.

  “But it would be easier to explain things in my shop. Would you mind very much abandoning your party and joining me there instead?”

  “You mean now?”

  He smiles. “Yes. Now.”

  My breathing is jagged and shallow, but I manage a slow, cool inhale. His eyes glimmer, and I return his smile. “I’d love to.”

  fourteen

  Nikolay’s warm hand slides to mine, pulling it from my own pocket and securing it in his hand in his equally warm pocket. Piper stares out Todd’s window again, but I wave to her as we pass, our feet crunching along the street. Her brows draw together at the sight of us. She doesn’t wave back.

  The cold air doesn’t bother me as it would have any other time. I’m walking down the street with an extremely good looking boy, who happens to have my hand tucked in his.

  We walk away from Hemlock Avenue in a silence that Nikolay seems more than content to swim in despite his furrowed brow. But the suspense is killing me.

  “Something is bothering you about those remains,” I say. He seems really thrown by the debris and by whatever it is he disheveled from it. “Tell me.”

  He glances back and I do the same, taking in the sight of the never-ending snow, blackened by the appearance of Piper’s demolished house. I can see why Todd’s mom is so anxious to have it cleared off. I wait for more fluttering crows, but there are no signs of black in the sky.

  Nikolay speaks. “I’m trying to figure out where to begin. And I think the first thing you need to know is about our books, Everly.”

  “Your books? What does that have to do with the crows?”

  “Some of the books are just like the one I gave you. Beautiful to the eye, with herbs woven into the spine for protection.”

  My brain spools, trying to keep up. “Protection how? That still isn’t clear to me.”

  “That book is like many others in my father’s shop, but different in the fact that it was given to you, not purchased. You’ve written in it, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say, though it sounds like a question. Suspicion dawns—was I not supposed to?

  “Then you have claimed it. And as long as you have it, it will protect you. It is not smert zhizn—the death life. With those books, the herbs we use, the spells drawn into the binding, make it so a person can transfer ailments and other things into its pages instead of experiencing them personally.”

  “They can do all that?”

  “Yours will not. It won’t take your problems away. But the herbs, the claim you’ve made on it, that will protect you.”

  I can’t help feeling a little flutter of pleasure. He gave me that book soon after I met him. He wanted to protect me, even then.

  I need to focus. This is all very interesting, but I don’t see what the books have to do with Piper’s house, or my crows.

  His breath puffs in an exhale, smoking in the cold air. “A man once lived in Piper’s house, a man named Augustus Garrett. He was said to have died in 1875, but the truth is, he never left.”

  “1875?” Piper left that little detail out. “She told me a little about that, but how is it even possible?”

  “There were two doors in Piper Crenshaw’s house. Doors sold to him by my father. There were…spells…associated with each door, but those spells expired when Mr. Garrett failed to keep up his end of the bargain.”

  Mr. Garrett. AKA Piper’s Time Traveling Serial Killer.

  “Which was?”

  “I only know it was complicated,” Nikolay says. “And whatever it was, it expired. He passed on into death as he should have many years ago. But the doors—the books. Augustus Garrett had a rather extensive library that he chose to keep at his home rather than our store. I’d have to look and see how many of our books he purchased to be sure. In any case, there was another door, one with something additional to his spell trapped behind it. Are you keeping up?”

  I glance down at our feet gradually collecting bits of snow with each step, but he probably doesn’t mean my pace.

  “I think I’m following all the details.” And if it wasn’t for the crows, for my phone or Piper’s and Todd’s story about her house as well, I’m not sure I’d accept it as readily as I do.

  “What was behind the door in Piper’s house? Was it the same door you were looking at back there, in the ruins?”

  “It was. Souls were bound to the books in that house, Everly. The way we transferred your nightmares into the book, to keep them there and give them a different connection.”

  “Piper never mentioned that. She only told me about the one ghost, not many.”

  “She may not know.”

  “You can bind people to your books?” I say, trying to envision it.

  Nikolay dips his head to one shoulder. “If it is done before their death, it is a painless and easy alternative to the pain of death. Unfortunately, those souls were burned in the Crenshaw’s, and were consequently freed.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Not if they were never released from their binding in our books. We can’t bind them to anything else once they’ve passed through this life. They can only transfer their appearance. As crows are known omens…”

  “They’ve taken on that form,” I finish.

  “They’re certainly less conspicuous. A simple crow can blend in with its surroundings.”

  “Unless you’re the only one who’s seeing them,” I argue. “That still doesn’t explain why they’re coming for me. Do you think that’s what they are? Messengers?”

  He hesitates. “I do. But I don’t think they’re trying to warn you about something. I think they’re trying to get you to do something for them.”

  Chills dust across my arms.

  “It is one of my father’s… services. Immortalizing people through books. Like Augustus Garrett, Piper’s ancestors were obsessed with remaining attached to this life, and so my father created special books to hold their souls. When Piper destroyed her house, she also destroyed those books. Only the souls don’t want to be set free.”

  “Ugh,” I groan. “It’s death. I mean, no one wants to die, but it’s a part of life.”

  “It is a thing many people fear,” Nikolay says, as if this is the most ordinary thing in the world to be discussing.

  “So you think…”

  “I think they’re desperate to stay in this world, and that is why they’re haunting you, Everly. I think they’ve been trying to lead you to Piper, to my store, to get my father and to restore them to their books.”

  Trying to lead me? “I’m not sure how that can be. I met Piper on my own, I stumbled across Terekhovs without a single sight of a crow.”

  “Maybe they needed you closer so you could do those things.”

  “Closer. You mean Cedarvale?” He shrugs. “I don’t know; I came to Cedarvale as an act of desperation. I—” Memories take over, making speech difficult.

  I backtrack to even a few days before I left. I was sorting through things in my parent’s storage room downstairs. It was when I found that perfume b
ottle, and my mom told me I should have it.

  I slept restlessly the next few nights, though I couldn’t remember why until after Mom found my diary. It wasn’t until I went to Jerry’s and there was a crow in the tree outside his apartment, that the nightmare crow appeared, fully fleshed.

  A sudden coldness hits straight in my chest. I stop mid-stride.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I always thought the dreams started when I got here, but they didn’t. They started just before I left.”

  “Before you left home?”

  I nod.

  Nikolay considers this. “Why did you come to Cedarvale?” he asks.

  I tuck my chin into my coat. “To get away. To be with Layla. Because Jerry wasn’t there for me.”

  “Are you certain you weren’t guided here somehow?”

  I think back, trying to peg any kind of specific instance or prompting. “I don’t know. But why me? I have nothing to do with Piper or her old house. And if this is true, how can you possibly put the freed souls back into something that’s been destroyed?”

  Nikolay’s pale skin is blotched with red from the cold. “Those are the exactly reasons we need to get back to my shop.”

  We round the corner, and find my car parked in front of Terekhov’s. The store is quiet, and Nikolay guides me up the spiral staircase and past the seductive romance novels. The door waits as if with one eyebrow raised, questioning our approach.

  “I have been completely honest with you thus far,” he says, holding my hand in front of the door. “Except for one instance.”

  “I knew this wasn’t a broom closet, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  He smirks. “I figured you would.”

  He extracts something small, shadowed, and palm-sized from his pocket. It’s a doorknob, stunningly carved and impressed with designs that leave his palm blackened with soot and ash.

  “This is what I removed from the debris.”

  “Why?” I ask, puzzled at what he can possibly want with some stray house’s doorknob.

  Nikolay wets his lips. “I could explain everything, Everly, but I think I would rather show you. Tell me, if there was anywhere in history you could travel to, where would it be?”

  I grow tense. “I don’t understand.”

  “Just answer the question,” he says gently.

  I sift through every interesting place I can think of, from Old West America to Pompeii, from ancient China and Egypt, to Renaissance Italy, to even the more recent 1940s, before settling on one.

  “Victorian England,” I finally answer.

  Nikolay’s eyes glint. He gives me an acquiescent nod as though I’ve just ordered a favorite dish at a restaurant, and he dips to insert the knob. A feeling swarms through the air around us, sizzling across my skin, and he offers me his hand.

  “Hold on to me and do not let go for any reason,” he says.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  Golden light breaks along the door’s outline. With a smile and a finger to his lips, he turns the knob.

  Light blinds me. Nikolay gently pulls me forward, and I step through, hoping against hope I don’t fall through some cosmic hole.

  Instead, my foot hits consecutive pavestones, rutted and uneven. I blink away the golden dust as it settles around us, forming streetlamps with wide glass lanterns at their tips, men in suits or just pants and suspenders, and women in bonnets and dresses with wide skirts lifted to avoid the snow. A horse-drawn carriage with two men atop it rolls through the sludge of mud and snow in the center of the street, and buildings carry on as far down as I can see.

  The air smells different as well. It’s filtered with smog and something tangy, something I’m not sure I want to know.

  My knees weaken. My mind searches for an explanation. This is a movie set. An illusion. But mud beneath the melting snow clings to a woman’s boots and the hem of her heavy, plain skirts. She attempts to lift them when a package in her hands slips.

  “Oh!” the woman cries, reaching for them before they hit the wet ground, but it’s too late. A rush of heat fills my cheeks as she dives for the paper-wrapped parcel that is slowly darkening from the bottom up.

  Another carriage rickets past to finish the package’s demise, and the woman dives back just in time to avoid being trampled on.

  Disorientation capsizes every reality I’ve ever known. I stutter and stammer, unable to form words, before a small laugh escapes. This is no movie set.

  The chill in the air, the awful, wonderful scent is real, these people, the horses and what they’re leaving behind them in the streets is real. The air ripples and people shift like pictures being interchanged, flashing in and out, one to another.

  My shocked eyes slide and find Nikolay analyzing me. I barely form the start of words, not managing to finish them.

  “Where—”

  “Victorian England,” he says. “A side-street in Yorkshire, to be exact. Not as glamorous as you thought, is it?”

  I’m dizzy, and I lean into him. Nikolay quickly tugs me out of the way of a few passing men with mustaches and suits. His arms support my waist, and I cling to him, waiting for the stability to stand on my own again.

  “This is absurd,” I finally manage. “You really—we’re really—?”

  He grins at this. “Yes.”

  My mind rushes over every antique back in the boxes in my apartment, and all the times I’ve fantasized about seeing those items used in everyday life, about seeing how women lived, how they worked, about experiencing it not just in books and movies, but being there.

  He tilts his head, ready to meet my gaze. “What are you thinking right this moment, zvyozdochka?”

  “I’m—” I take it all in. The rounded windows on either side of the apothecary’s door, paned with tiny squares. A tea dealer’s storefront, a larger building heralded as The Daily News in bulky letters near its roof. Other stores with names scrawled above their doors, stamped with numbers and lanterns, their wooden, hand-painted signs dangling out to be more visible.

  “How? How is this possible? You told me to pick a time period. Any time period. Can you visit anywhere you like?”

  “If we need to,” he says. “We are all living on a line of time. This pathway is called ostium nexu. It is just an alternate, paranormal route to the one we’re all on. On this pathway I can access any time I choose. And in any place.”

  “Oh my goodness.” I wrap my arms around him, needing the support. Of all the things I could have imagined that door would do, traveling through time was never on the list.

  “It is what gives my father his abilities. He can manipulate energy and change it in others because of his access.”

  “Your father took Sierra through this door,” I say, scanning for it, wondering how it all works.

  Nikolay releases his hold around me and slips his fingers through mine. “Yes, he did.”

  Another carriage rolls past, sloshing through the muddy street. “You said it was so he could speak with Piper’s ghost.”

  “Yes. But this is no séance door, as you mused. We do not summon the dead. But we can visit them.” He gestures back to the street.

  “Incredible,” I say, staring thunderstruck at the surroundings. These people lived their lives. They’re gone from mine, yet somehow still here. “Piper’s ghost. What time period was she from?”

  “1875, the same period as Augustus Garrett. This is how I knew Augustus Garrett, in fact,” Nikolay says. “I met him in my father’s store when Papa first began advertising his… tailored skills.”

  “You’re—” I prop a hand against the brick building. A headache pricks the base of my skull. “Nikolay, you’re from 1875?”

  Nikolay inhales. “Time travel is complex. Garrett actually traveled forward to meet us. In 1917.”

  This time my knees do
give out. My hand slips.

  “Everly—no. Do not let go of me!”

  He reaches, but my fingers slide from his hand.

  fifteen

  I sink away, thoughts streaming from time to place to circumstance to reality. Or what I thought was reality.

  “This is surreal,” I mumble, trying to get a grip. But there’s nothing to grab onto.

  The world blurs around me. Images flicker in and out of existence, lasting only seconds before blaring into something else. Men, women children. Begging, pleading, broken, in worn clothing, in aprons over simple dresses, in tattered shirts carrying pitchforks, in bare feet. Elegant parties, men and women dancing, people smoking on street corners, their clothing shifting styles so quickly it gives me whiplash.

  It will be okay, I tell myself. It will be okay.

  But this is Nikolay’s world. Nikolay is a hundred years old.

  The phone, the crows; why shouldn’t elongated life be possible as well? It would explain Nikolay’s suave, vintage look, and the way he speaks and carries himself. It would explain the exultant way he acted when he stepped away from his store. When was the last time he left it?

  “This should be Layla,” I tell myself, thinking of her obsession with horror movies. “Not me.”

  But this is me. The old glass bottles I’ve collected, the antique suitcase with its silk lining, the wrought iron sewing machine—I could see them all as they were originally used, back when they were the way of life instead of a decorative tribute to a lost time. Even my favorite piece, the perfume bottle, hails back to this time.

  Something grips my arm, hard, jerking me aside and out of the light. And before I know where I am, Nikolay’s face appears before me in a passion of rage and concern.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nikolay!”

  He glances around as if to make sure we aren’t seen, then pulls me to the side while the light slowly begins to fade.

  Instead of the street I expect to see, books blur into view all around us. These aren’t from his store. This is a personal library, an at-home study, the kind where two tiers of shelves surround the wooden walled room, and stuffed leather chairs lure you to sit in them. It smells like wood, and paper, and smoke, like something recently charred in a kitchen somewhere. The smoke smell is everywhere, infiltrating my nose and making me nearly gag. It’s as though I’m in the middle of the fire though no flames are visible.