The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  Ade didn’t know much about the wider world, but she knew for certain this man lived there. Everything about him spoke of precision and order. His woolen coat was short and sharp, revealing a long length of pressed black trouser. His graying mustache was clipped with surgical precision. There was an almost imperceptible shuffling sound as every member of the congregation attempted to look at the stranger without anyone else seeing them look.

  The service ended and the flow of people bottlenecked itself around the interloper. A few of the first-pew families had taken it upon themselves to make introductions and inquiries. They hoped he’d enjoyed their little service (although Ade was unconvinced that enjoyment was even a distant goal of Preacher McDowell’s) and wondered at his occupation in the area. Perhaps he had relations nearby? Or business on the river?

  “Thank you very kindly, sirs, but no, I’ve no interest in riverboats. I confess I’m a land man, looking for likely property.” His voice carried over the heads of the congregation, nasally and foreign-sounding, and Mama Larson huffed beside Ade. No one ought to speak above a respectful murmur while under the church roof.

  “I heard in Mayfield there might be some affordable acreage near here—apparently it’s haunted, and not much used—and I took this opportunity to make myself known to you folks.” There was a rippling beside the stranger, a pulling-away. Ade supposed they didn’t much like the idea of a big-city northerner bulling into their church just to swindle them out of cheap land. They weren’t far enough south for carpetbaggers to be much more than badly inked cartoons in the Sunday paper, but they knew the signs. From the tone of their muttered replies Ade guessed they were stonewalling him (no, sir, no land hereabouts, you’ll have to look somewheres else).

  The stream of people began to leave and Ade trailed behind Aunt Lizzie as they filed down the aisle. The stranger was still smiling with affable condescension at everyone, undeterred. Ade stopped.

  “We got a house on our property that everybody knows is full of haunts—saw one myself, just yesterday—but it’s not for sale,” she told the stranger. She didn’t know why she said it, except she wanted to shake the smugness out of him and prove they weren’t poor rural folk who would sell land cheaply out of baseless superstition. And perhaps because she was curious, hungry for the man’s worldly otherness.

  “Did you now.” The man smiled at her in what he must have thought was a charming manner, and leaned closer. “Permit me to walk you out, in that case.” Ade found her arm clamped to his suit sleeve, her feet stumbling alongside his. Her aunts were already outside, likely fanning themselves and gossiping. “Now, what’s the nature of these haunts? What did you see, precisely?”

  But her desire to speak to the man had evaporated. She tugged her hand away, shrugging in a sullen, adolescent way, and would have left without speaking another word except that his eyes caught hers. They were the color of moons or coins, unspeakably cold but also somehow alluring, as if they possessed their own gravitational pull.

  Even years later, curled beside me in the languorous warmth of the late-afternoon sun, Ade would shudder, just a little, as she described that gaze.

  “Tell me all about it,” the stranger breathed.

  And Ade did. “Well, I just was going to the old cabin for no reason and there was a ghost boy waiting there. Or at least that’s what I thought he was at first, on account of he was black and funny-dressed and speaking in tongues. But he didn’t come from hell or anything. I don’t know where he come from, exactly, except he ended up walking out of our cabin door. And I’m glad he did, I liked him, liked his hands—” She closed her teeth on the words, reeling and a little breathless.

  The not-very-charming smile had returned to the stranger’s face as she spoke, except now there was a kind of predatory stillness beneath it. “Thank you awfully much, Miss—?”

  “Adelaide Lee Larson.” She swallowed, blinked. “Pardon me, sir, my aunts are calling.”

  She skittered out the church doors without looking back at the stranger in the neat suit. She felt his eyes like a pair of dimes pressed to the back of her neck.

  Because of her aunts’ essential softheartedness, Ade’s punishments never varied. She was confined to the upstairs room where they all slept (except Mama Larson, who did not sleep so much as nap haphazardly in a variety of semisupine positions downstairs) for the following two days. Ade bore this confinement with poor grace—the Larson women would spend those days haunted by bangings and thumpings above them, as if their house hosted a particularly foul-tempered poltergeist—but no real resistance. In her figuring, it was best to lull them into complacence before climbing out the window and scrabbling down the honeysuckle on the evening of the third day.

  On Monday she was supplied with a basket of fresh laundry to fold and a few stacks of ripped underclothes to mend, because Aunt Lizzie insisted that lying in bed all day was more reward than punishment, and said she might run off tomorrow evening herself and they could lock her upstairs next for some bed rest. At lunch the loft grew greasy with the smell of frying bacon and beans. Ade dropped a Bible on the floor to remind them to bring her up something to eat.

  But none of her aunts appeared. There was an authoritative thumping on the front door, followed by the astonished silence of five women so unaccustomed to visitors they weren’t quite sure what action ought to follow a knock at the door. Then a timid chair-scraping and shuffling, and the door creaking inward. Ade lay flat on the floor and pressed her ear to the pine boards.

  She heard nothing but the low, foreign rumblings of a strange man in their kitchen, and five women’s voices rising and falling around it like a flock of startled river birds. Once a hearty laugh boomed upward, drum-hollow and well practiced. Ade thought of the big-city man at the church service and felt a strange darkening, a fear of something nameless hanging on her horizon.

  The man left, the door closed, and the twittering of the aunts crescendoed into something like cackling.

  It was an hour or more before Aunt Lizzie brought up a plate of cold beans. “And who was that at the door?” Ade asked. She was still lying on the floor, having found herself paralyzed by a combination of lassitude and dread.

  “Never you mind, nosy. Just a bit of good news is all.” Lizzie looked quite smug as she said it, like a woman hiding a grand surprise. Had it been one of her other aunts Ade might have bullied her for more information, but bullying Aunt Lizzie was like bullying a mountain, except mountains didn’t switch you for impertinence. Ade rolled onto her back and watched the sunbeams stretch across the loft ceiling, pooling in the gullies between rafters. She wondered what the sun might look like elsewhere, in some other world, and if there were really any other worlds to see. Already the things the ghost boy told her were fading and fraying.

  On the morning of the third day Ade woke with a foreboding heaviness in her limbs. Her aunts and grandmother still snored and snuffled around her in a sea of quilts and woman-flesh. Sunrise was reluctant and gray, too slow in coming.

  Ade sat tense among her aunts as they dressed, wishing herself out the window and in the hayfield already. Her bones hummed and strained; her feet tap-tapped on the floorboards. The loft was close and humid from their sleeping breath.

  “We’re going to town today,” Mama Larson announced, and gestured for her town hat—an enormous white bonnet she’d purchased sometime in the 1850s, which looked and smelled increasingly like a stuffed rabbit. “But you’re staying put, Ade, on account of the heart attack you gave us.”

  Ade blinked. Then she nodded meekly, because it seemed polite to maintain the fiction that she would obey.

  By the time all the Larson women were truly gone—and it took an eternity of fussing with dresses and stockings, followed by another small eternity in the barn convincing the mules they ought to wear a harness and pull a cart before this was accomplished—Ade was almost shuddering with the urge to be elsewhere. She took a September apple and her aunt Lizzie’s work coat and left at a scurrying almo
st-run.

  There was no one waiting at the old cabin. There was, in fact, no old cabin at which to wait: the field was blank, featureless, empty but for a few sulky-looking crows and a line of fresh iron stakes driven into the earth.

  Ade closed her eyes against a sudden disorienting dizziness, stumbling forward. Where the cabin used to stand she found a raw tumble of broken lumber, as if a giant’s hand had reached casually from the sky to topple it.

  There was nothing left of the door but a few lichen-splotched splinters.

  The lamps were lit in the windows by the time she arrived home. The mules were back in the pasture looking ruffled and sweat-stained, and Ade could hear the self-satisfied cackling of her aunts in the kitchen. The laughter stopped when she opened the door.

  The five of them stood gathered around the kitchen table admiring a stack of neat cream-striped shopping boxes. Packing paper seemed to drift around them in crinkling clouds, and each woman was pink-cheeked with some secret exhilaration. Their smiles were strange and girlish.

  “Adelaide Lee, where—”

  “Why are there survey stakes on our land?” Ade asked. Each of her relatives, she saw, was dressed more grandly than she had been that morning, with a profusion of velvet ribbons and even the foreign humps of bustles beneath rich-colored skirts. In her muddied dress and tangled braid, Ade felt suddenly distant from them all, as if she and her aunts were standing at opposite ends of a very large room.

  It was Mama Larson who answered. “We got some luck, finally.” Her hand swept in a queenly gesture at the kitchen table. “That big-city man come by yesterday and offered us good money for the old hayfield. Real good money.” The aunts tittered. “And there wasn’t a reason in the world we shouldn’t take it. He handed over cash—all of it stashed in his pockets!—and I signed over the deed then and there. What’s a overgrown hayfield to us, anyway?” The last phrase sounded like it had been said many times between them in the last day.

  Aunt Lizzie stepped forward with a box. “Don’t look so grim, Adelaide. Look, I meant to save it for your birthday, but—” She opened the box to show Ade a long length of periwinkle cotton. “Thought it’d match your eyes.”

  Ade found her voice had entirely deserted her. She patted Lizzie’s hand, hoping they might think she was overcome with gratitude, and ran upstairs before her tears could make their treacherous paths down her cheeks.

  She crawled animal-like into the sagging center of her rope bed. She felt rubbed raw, as if the grasses in the field had been sharp-edged, cutting away at that childish part of her that believed in adventure and magic.

  She had lingered beside the ruins of the cabin all day, knowing the ghost boy would not appear but waiting anyway.

  Perhaps there had never been an elsewhere, and she was simply young and lonely and foolish, and had dreamed up a story about a ghost boy and another world to keep herself company. Perhaps there was nothing at all except the rule-bound world of her aunts and grandmother, real as corn bread and dirt and just as dull.

  She came very near to believing it. But she found there was something new in her, some wild seed buried in her chest, that could not accept the world as it was.

  You see, doors are many things: fissures and cracks, ways between, mysteries and borders. But more than anything else, doors are change.3 When things slip through them, no matter how small or brief, change trails them like porpoises following a ship’s wake. The change had already taken hold of Adelaide Lee, and she could not turn away.

  And so that night, lying half-heartbroken and lost in her bed, Ade chose to believe. She believed in something mad and elsewise, in the feel of the boy’s dry lips against hers in the dying light, in the possibility that there were cracked-open places in the world through which strange and wonderful things might seep.

  In believing, Ade felt the scattered uncertainties of her youth falling away. She was a hound that finally caught the scent it sought, a lost sailor suddenly handed a compass. If doors were real, then she would seek them out, ten or ten thousand of them, and fall through into ten thousand vast elsewheres.

  And one of them, someday, might lead to a city by the sea.

  A Door to Anywhere

  You know the feeling of waking up in an unfamiliar room and not knowing how you got there? For a minute you’re just drifting, suspended in the timeless unknown, like Alice falling forever down the rabbit hole.

  I’d woken almost every morning of my life in that gray little room on the third floor of Locke House. The sun-faded floorboards, the inadequate bookshelf overflowing with stacks of paperbacks, Bad sprawled beside me like a hairy furnace: all of it was as familiar as my own skin. But still—for a single stretched moment, I didn’t know quite where I was.

  I didn’t know why there were crusted salt trails down my cheeks. I didn’t know why there was an aching emptiness just beneath my ribs, as if something vital had been cut away from me in the night. I didn’t know why the corner of a book was jabbing into my jaw.

  I remembered the book first. An overgrown hayfield. A girl and a ghost. A door that led marvelously elsewhere. And an eerie, echoing sense of familiarity, as if I’d heard the story before and couldn’t recall the ending. How had such a thing ended up in my blue Egyptian chest? And who wrote it in the first place? And why did Ade Larson feel like a friend I’d had as a child and then forgotten?

  (I could feel myself leaning desperately toward these pleasant mysteries. As if there were something else hovering just on the edges of my vision, waiting to pounce if I looked directly at it.)

  There was a rustling from Jane’s bed across the room. “January? Are you awake?”

  Something about her voice, an uncharacteristic hesitance, a fearful softening, made me think: She knows.

  And then: Knows what?

  And then I remembered. Father is dead. The huge, cold thing sprang from the shadows and ate me whole, and everything went sort of grayish and dullish and faraway-seeming. My tale of adventure and mystery became nothing but a worn leather-bound book again.

  I heard Jane rising, stretching, dressing for the day. I had the dim sense that she was going to say something to me, something comforting or consoling, and the thought was like a wire brush on rubbed-raw skin. I screwed my eyes shut and clutched Bad closer.

  Then there was the creak of the window opening, and a warm, dew-heavy breeze ruffled my hair. Jane said, mildly, “Let’s go out, eh? It’s a lovely morning.”

  It was such a normal, Saturday-morning sort of thing for her to suggest. It was one of our favorite rituals, to go out on the grounds with a basket of biscuits, an armload of paperbacks, and a quilt that smelled permanently grassy from its long service as a picnic blanket. Thinking about it now—the peaceable quiet; the warm, sleepy sound of dragonflies—was like thinking of safe harbor in a storm.

  God bless you, Miss Jane Irimu.

  I found I was able to sit up, and then stand, and then make all my usual morning motions. It turns out that once you begin, habit and memory keep your body moving in the right directions, like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds. I dressed at random: stockings with several holes in the heels, a plain brownish skirt, a peony blouse several inches too short on my wrists. I fended off Bad’s excited nips and dragged a brush through my crackling hair (I had nursed a secret hope that puberty might domesticate my hair, but it had instead inspired it to new and greater heights).

  By the time we left the room I’d achieved a false, fragile normalcy. And then I stumbled over the package waiting for me in the hall.

  It was a box of such surpassing whiteness and squareness I knew it must have come from one of those exclusive shops in New York with a gold-cursive sign and gleaming glass windows. A note was propped neatly on top:

  My dear girl—

  Though you may feel indisposed, I request your attendance at tonight’s party. I wish to give you your birthday present.

  Several lines were scratched out here. Then:

  I a
m sorry for your loss.

  CL

  P.S. Do your hair.

  Locke hadn’t dictated it to his secretary; that was his own architectural lettering. Seeing it was like feeling his icy eyes pressing me down again—accept it—and the cold black thing seemed to wrap itself more tightly around me.

  Jane read the note over my shoulder and her lips went thin and hard as a penny. “Nothing can save you from the Society party, it seems.”

  The annual party—which I’d been dreading for a week or two—was tonight. I’d forgotten. I pictured myself weaving through drunken white crowds, pushing past men who laughed too loudly and sloshed their champagne over my shoes, wishing I could wipe the oily feeling of their eyes off my skin. Would everyone know about my father? Would they care? I felt the note tremble in my hand.

  Jane snatched it from me and folded it into her skirt pocket. “Never mind. We’ve got hours yet.” And she tucked my hand beneath her elbow and marched us down two flights of stairs, through the kitchens where the cooks were too harried and sweaty to notice us snatching jam and rolls and a kettle of coffee, and out into the pristine lawns of Locke House.

  We wandered at first. Through the hedged gardens where the gardeners were busy murdering anything that looked too lively or untamed, along the ruffled lakeshore, where herons hooted their annoyance at Bad and waves tap-tapped at the shore. We wound up in a grassy overlook far enough from the house that no garden shears had denuded it, with the countryside laid before us like a wrinkled green tablecloth.

  Jane poured herself coffee and delved immediately into the seventh book in the Tom Swift series (Jane had transitioned from skeptic to addict on the subject of low-grade serial fiction; thus had Samuel’s boyhood vice claimed another victim). I didn’t read anything. I just lay on the quilt and stared at the soft eggshell of the sky and let the sunshine pool and sizzle on my skin. I could almost hear Mr. Locke’s huffing in my ear: Not doing your complexion any favors, girl. My father never seemed to care.