The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  Dalton Gray shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? Had it from Gene they were lost and found an old stone church from the silver-mining days and lived there for a week or two. They said it was a perfectly ordinary little church, except it had an ocean out the back door!” The laughter rallied again but petered away; Ade Larson was gathering up her uneaten lunch and walking northwest, across the mill yard toward the East Texas & Gulf Railway.

  I found no trace of Ade from Texas to Colorado. She simply appears in the town of Alma a month later, like a diver surfacing, asking about boots and furs and the sorts of gear a woman would need to survive the bitter arctic spring of the Front Range. The local storekeeper remembers watching her leave with irritable pity, certain they’d find her thawing body on the trails come summer.

  But instead, the woman returned down Mount Silverheels ten days later, chap-cheeked and grinning in a fortunate way that reminded the storekeeper of miners who have struck gold. She asked him where she could find a sawmill.

  He told her, but added, “Pardon me, ma’am, but why would you need lumber?”

  “Oh.” Ade laughed, and the storekeeper would later recall it as a madwoman’s full-moon cackle. “To build a boat.”

  The spectacle of a lone young woman with no particular carpentry skill building a sailboat in the thin-aired heights of the Rockies did not, of course, go unnoticed. Ade had cobbled together a sort of camp at the base of Silverheels that looked, as one reporter phrased it, “like a shantytown recently visited by a tornado.” Pine planks lay scattered on the frozen ground, bent into tortured arcs. Borrowed tools were jumbled in the careless piles of a person who does not intend to use them more than once. Ade herself presided over the chaos in a smoke-heavy bearskin, swearing cheerily as she worked.

  By April the boat had an identifiable shape; a slim, sap-scented rib cage lay in the middle of her camp like some unfortunate sea creature God had forgotten to grant skin or scales.

  The first newspapermen appeared shortly thereafter, and the first printed report was a blurred sidebar in the Leadville Daily, unimaginatively titled WOMAN BUILDS BOAT, PUZZLES LOCALS. It generated enough gossip and hilarity that the story leapfrogged into larger papers, printed and reprinted and eventually trotted out in conjunction with the tale of the trappers who found an ocean. More than a month later, after Ade and her boat were long gone from Alma, it even migrated as far as the New York Times, under the much snappier title LADY NOAH OF THE ROCKIES: COLORADO MADWOMAN PREPARED FOR THE FLOOD.

  I would give anything—every word in the Written, every star in every world, my own two hands—to unpublish that damned story.

  Ade never read any of the articles about her, as far as I am aware. She simply worked on her sailboat, scabbing planks one over the other to make the hull and consulting with a local roofer who bemusedly gave her the tallow-and-spruce-sap recipe to caulk her joints. The canvas sail was a poorly stitched mess that would have appalled any one of her aunts, and it hung stiff from a stubby mast, but by the end of the month Ade was convinced it was the most glorious and seaworthy vessel in the world, or at least above ten thousand feet. She burned its name into the prow in shaky charcoal lines: The Key.

  She walked into town that very evening and spent the last of her hoarded cottonseed wages acquiring cured ham and tinned beans, three large canteens, a compass, and the hired help of two young men who were made to understand in broken Spanish that she’d like a boat carried up a mountain. I found one of these gentlemen years later, a Mr. Lucio Martinez, and he confessed to me with bitter weariness that he wished he’d never agreed to the venture. He’d spent the better part of a decade under a cloud of baseless suspicion because he and his friend were the last living persons to have seen the mad white woman and her boat before she disappeared. The local sheriff even interrogated him a year or two after the event itself, insisting that Mr. Martinez draw him a very precise map of where Adelaide was last seen.

  Ade could not have known then what miseries poor Mr. Martinez would endure when they parted ways at the peak of Mount Silverheels, and I am not sure by then she would have cared. She was driven by the pure selfishness of a knight nearing the end of their quest, and could no more turn away from her goal than a compass needle could point south.

  She waited for Lucio and his friend to crisscross back down the slope, and for the half-moon to paint the pines in soft silver. Then she dragged her haphazard vessel along a deer trail to a low stone building that might once have served as a miners’ church, or perhaps something older and holier.

  The doorway was just as she’d found it weeks previously. It took up almost the entirety of its stacked-stone wall, framed in vast timbers gone age-black. A rough hole in the planking was the only handle, and already Ade could swear a soft breeze whistled through it carrying the smell of salt and cedar and long, sun-gilded days.

  It was a smell that shouldn’t have been familiar to her, but it was. It was the smell of the ghost boy’s skin as they’d kissed in a late-summer field. It was the smell of elsewhere.

  She opened the door and launched her boat into the strange seas of another world.

  The Unlocked Door

  My eyes, when I opened them, felt as if they’d been plucked from my head, rolled in coarse sand, and crammed clumsily back into my skull. My mouth was gummed and sour, and my skull seemed to have shrunk several sizes overnight. For a few disoriented seconds I forgot the half-dozen glasses of champagne from the party and wondered dizzily if the book had done this to me. As if a story could ferment in my veins, like wine, and leave me drunk.

  If any story could have done it, it would have been that one. I’d certainly read better books with more adventure and kissing and less pontificating, but none of them had left me with this fragile, impossible suspicion that maybe, somehow, it was all true. That there were Doors hidden in every shadowed place, waiting to be opened. That a woman might shed her childhood skin, snakelike, and fling herself into the seething unknown.

  It seemed unlikely that Mr. Locke would give me something so fanciful, no matter how sorry he felt for me. How, then, had it found its way into my treasure box in the Pharaoh Room?

  But the mystery of it felt thin and distant beneath the weight of the Thing that still sat on my chest. I began to see how it would always be there, how it would cleave to my flesh like a second skin, secretly poisoning everything I touched.

  I felt the damp poke of Bad’s nose as he rooted under my arm, the way he had as a puppy. It was far too hot—the July sun was oozing across the floorboards now, baking against the copper roof—but I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his fur. We lay sweat-sticky while the sun rose and Locke House creaked and murmured around us.

  I was drifting into a forced, heat-dazed sleep when the door opened.

  I smelled coffee and heard familiar, decisive steps across the floor. Some secret tenseness in my chest unwound itself, exhaling relief: She’s still here.

  Jane was dressed and alert in a way that said she had been awake for a considerable time and refrained from disturbing me for as long as was decent. She balanced a pair of steaming cups on the bookshelf, dragged a spindly chair to my bedside, and sat with her arms neatly crossed.

  “Good morning, January.” There was something almost stern in her voice, businesslike. Perhaps a single day was the acceptable mourning period for a mostly absent father. Perhaps she was just irritated at me for sleeping late and monopolizing our room. “I heard from the kitchen girls the party was, ah, eventful.”

  I made a moany, I-don’t-want-to-discuss-it sound.

  “Is it true that you got drunk, shouted at Mr. Locke, and stormed out of the smoking room? And then—unless my informants are mistaken—disappeared with the Zappia boy?”

  I repeated the moany sound, a bit louder. Jane merely raised her eyebrows. I threw an arm over my face, stared at the orangey afterglow of my eyelids, and grunted: “Yes.”

  She laughed, a rolling boom that made Bad jump. “There’s h
ope for you yet. There are times I think you’re too much of a mouse to make it out in the world, but perhaps I am wrong.” She paused, sobering. “When I first met your father he told me you were a troublesome, feral child; I hope that’s so. You’ll need it.”

  I wanted to ask if he’d spoken often of me, and what he’d said, and if he’d ever mentioned that one day he would take me along with him, but the words clotted in my throat. I swallowed. “For what?”

  That stern, very-nearly-irritated expression returned to her face. “Things can’t just keep on forever the way they are, January. Things must change.”

  Ah. This was it, then. She was going to tell me that she would be leaving soon, returning home to the highlands of British East Africa and abandoning me alone in this little gray room. I tried to squash the scrabbling panic in my chest. “I know. You’re going.” I hoped I sounded cool and adult, hoped she didn’t notice the way the sheets were balled in my fists. “Now that—now that Father is dead.”

  “Missing,” she corrected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your father is missing, not dead.”

  I shook my head, rising up on one elbow. “Mr. Locke said—”

  Jane’s lips curled, and she made a gesture like a woman swatting a gnat. “Locke is not God, January.”

  He might as well be. I didn’t answer but knew my face had gone mulish with denial.

  Jane sighed at me, but her voice when she spoke again was softer, almost hesitant. “I have reason to believe—your father made certain assurances—well. I haven’t given up on Julian, not yet. Perhaps you shouldn’t, either.”

  The black Thing seemed to curl closer around me, an invisible nautilus shell protecting me from her words, hope-laced and cruel. I closed my eyes again and rolled away from her. “I don’t feel like coffee. Thank you.”

  A sharp indrawn breath. Had I offended her? Good. Maybe she would just leave without pretending to miss me, without false promises about staying in touch.

  But then she hissed, “What’s that?” and I felt her hand fumble in the sheets at my back. A small squarish something slid out from beneath me.

  I sat up and saw The Ten Thousand Doors clutched in her hands, her fingertips white where they pressed into the cover. “That’s mine, if you don’t—”

  “Where did you get this?” Her voice was perfectly level but oddly urgent.

  “It was a gift,” I said defensively. “I think.”

  But she wasn’t listening. She was riffling through the book with hands that shook slightly, eyes skittering across the words as if they were some vital message written just for her. I felt a strange, illogical jealousy.

  “Does it say anything about the irimu? The leopard-women? Did he find—”

  A harsh rap-rap-rap on the door. Bad stood, one white tooth bared.

  “Miss Jane? Mr. Locke would like a private word with you, if you please.” It was Mr. Stirling, sounding as usual like a typewriter that had somehow learned to walk and talk.

  Jane and I stared at one another. Mr. Locke had never, in her two years at Locke House, spoken a private word to her, nor more than a dozen public ones. He regarded her as a regrettable necessity, like an ugly vase one is obliged to keep because it was a gift from a friend.

  I watched Jane’s throat move, swallowing whatever emotion made her palms leave dark, damp patches on the leather-bound book. “I’ll be right there, Mr. Stirling, thank you.”

  A professionally tuned throat-clearing noise sounded on the other side of the door. “Now, if you please.”

  Jane closed her eyes, jaw rolling in frustration. “Yes, sir,” she called. She stood, tucking my book in her skirt pocket and resting her palm against it as if reassuring herself of its existence. In a much quieter voice, she hissed, “We’ll talk when I return.”

  I should’ve grabbed on to her skirts and demanded an explanation. I should’ve told Mr. Stirling to shut his mouth, and enjoyed the stunned silence thereafter.

  But I didn’t.

  Jane swept into the hall and everything went silent and still again, except for the agitated swirl of the dust motes disturbed by her passage. Bad hopped to the floor, stretched, and shook himself. A mist of fine bronze hairs joined the dust, glinting gold in the sunbeams.

  I fell back into the mattress. I could hear the neat snick of the gardener’s shears outside on the grounds. The distant burr of a motorcar trundling past the wrought-iron gates. The too-fast patter of my heart, fluttering against my ribs like someone knocking frantically at a locked door.

  Mr. Locke had told me my father was dead. Accept it, he’d told me, and I had. But what if—?

  Sour exhaustion welled in my limbs. How many years of my life had I spent waiting for my father, believing he would return tomorrow or the next day? Rushing to collect the mail, searching for his neat handwriting in the pile? Hoping and trying not to hope for the day he would come home and say, January, the time has come, and I would go away with him into the shining unknown?

  Surely I could spare myself this last and greatest disappointment.

  I wished Jane had left my book behind. I wanted to run away again, back into Ade’s quest for her ghost boy. So many years she’d spent searching on only the thinnest, most unlikely thread of hope. I wondered what she would have done in my place.

  Go find out for myself. The answer came in a flat, southern-streaked voice that I thought must be Ade’s own, if she’d been a person rather than a fictional character. It rang clear and strong in my skull, as if I’d heard it before. Go find him.

  I lay very still, feeling a dangerous shivering spread from my chest like a sudden fever.

  But a more grown-up, sober-sounding voice reminded me that The Ten Thousand Doors was just a novel, and that novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren’t concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all the guile of a piper luring rats into a river.

  It would be wiser to stay here, beg my way back into Mr. Locke’s good graces after last night’s debacle, and keep my childish dreams locked up where they belonged. Learn to forget the low, sincere sound of my father’s voice as he said I promise.

  You never came back for me. You never rescued me.

  But perhaps—if I were brave and temerarious and very foolish—if I listened to that flat, fearless voice in my heart, so familiar and so strange—I could rescue both of us.

  I didn’t expect to see anyone on my way out. I should have—several Society men were staying as Locke’s honored guests, occupying the gaudy guest suites on the second floor, and the house was still crawling with hired servants cleaning up after the party—but Running Away from Home involves a very particular and time-worn script: Bad and I were supposed to slip out the front door and down the drive like a pair of ghosts. Later Locke might storm up to my room and find my note (uninformative but apologetic, thanking him for years of generosity and kindness) and swear softly. He might stare out the window after me, far too late.

  Except Mr. Locke was standing in the foyer. And so was Mr. Havemeyer.

  “—just a child, Theodore. I’ll have it all sorted out in a day or two.” Locke was standing with his back to me, one arm making the confident gestures of a banker reassuring a nervous patron, the other holding Havemeyer’s coat. Havemeyer was reaching for it, face narrowed in doubt, when he saw me standing on the staircase.

  “Ah. Your prize malcontent, Cornelius.” Havemeyer’s smile was only a smile in the sense that his lips were curved and his teeth were bared. Locke turned. I watched his face move from cold disapproval to consternation, his mouth falling slightly open.

  Under that frowning, what’s-all-this-nonsense gaze, I felt myself falter. The swooping, heady confidence that had taken me this far—dressing myself in my sturdiest clothes, stuffing a canvas bag full of semirandom belongings, writing two notes and arranging them artistically—wavered, and I felt suddenly ve
ry much like a child announcing she was running away from home. It occurred to me that I’d packed at least nine or ten books, but not a single pair of spare socks.

  Locke opened his mouth, chest swelling with the coming sermon, but I’d just realized something. If he was down here with Havemeyer, he was clearly finished meeting with Jane—but she hadn’t come back.

  “Where’s Jane?” I interrupted. She was supposed to return to our room and find the note I’d hidden in Tom Swift and His Airship. Then she would join me in Boston, book passage on an eastbound steamer, and begin our adventure. If she wanted to; my clever plan evaded the necessity of asking her face-to-face and the possibility of hearing her say no.

  Locke’s face had whitened in irritation. “Return to your room, child. I’ll deal with you later. In fact, you are hereby confined to your quarters until such time as I deem—”

  “Where’s Jane?”

  Havemeyer, watching, drawled, “It’s comforting to find you aren’t only rude when drunk, Miss Scaller.”

  Locke ignored him. “January. Upstairs. Now.” His voice had gone low and urgent. I looked away from his face but felt his pale eyes grasping and fastening on my flesh, prodding me backward. “Return to your room—”

  But I was tired of listening to Mr. Locke, tired of the weight of his will crushing me smaller and smaller, tired of minding my place. “No.” It came out a wavering whisper. I swallowed, touching my fingers to Bad’s bronze heat. “No. I’m leaving.”

  I ducked my head and squared my shoulders, like a woman walking into a strong headwind, and heaved my bag down the steps and across the foyer. I kept my spine very straight.

  We were almost past them, almost within reach of the brass handle of the front door, when Havemeyer laughed. It was a hideous, high-pitched hiss that made Bad’s hackles rise beneath my palm. I looped my fingers through his collar.

  “And where could a thing like you possibly be going?” he asked. He lifted his cane and gave my canvas sack a mocking prod.